Fulton reprimanded for 2022 election snafu

1,326 votes missed because of issue with memory cards.

Election workers in Ful- ton County initially failed to count 1,326 votes during the 2022 primary because they weren’t loaded from memory cards, an investigation report said.

The State Election Board reprimanded the county, which corrected its vote totals. The discrepancy didn’t change the outcome of any races.

The investigation report was obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week through a request under the Georgia Open Records Act.

Votes from seven memory ds, which store votes from ballot scanning machines, weren’t recorded on elec- tion night, the report said. Either an election worker didn’t click on the correct box to load results, memory cards were removed from computers prematurely or there was an unknown tech- nical error.

“The exact cause could not be determined, but it is believed that human error during the (vote) extraction process was the most likely cause,” the report said. “Fulton County elections instituted a new procedure ... to ensure that all precincts and tabulators that were created on the election management system have also had their results uploaded.”

The secretary of state’s office detected the problem because one precinct showed zero votes cast, raising a “red flag,” the investigation report said.

Fulton Elections Director Nadine Williams said the problem won’t happen again.

“We have put processes in place. There’s at least two different layers of reconciliation to make sure we identify this problem to ensure it doesn’t reoccur,” she told the State Election Board at its Feb. 13 meeting. “We are triple-checking ... to make sure that memory card is captured and uploaded.”

There was a similar issue in Cobb County wi h a memory card that wasn’t loaded correctly in November 2022, changing the results of a Kennesaw City Council election.