NW Georgia News

Floyd County, while recounting its ballots, discovered approximately 2,600 more ballots than previously counted.

The batch of ballots ended up netting President Donald Trump about 800 votes. Gabriel Sterling with the Secretary of State’s Office noted that the ballots were discovered in a box off to the side that no one had noticed. 

This comes after previous counties discovered more votes. In Fayette County, there were 2,755 votes discovered — 1,128 for former Vice President Joe Biden and 1,577 for Trump.

The Secretary of State’s Office also noted that it had conducted an audit on voting machines.

"Pro V&V conducted an audit of a random sample of Dominion Voting Systems voting machines throughout the state using forensic techniques, including equipment from Cobb, Douglas, Floyd, Morgan, Paulding, and Spalding Counties,” the statement read. “ICP (precinct ballot scanners), ICX (ballot marking devices), and ICC (central absentee ballot scanners) components were all subject to the audit. In conducting the audit, Pro V&V extracted the software or firmware from the components to check that the only software or firmware on the components was certified for use by the Secretary of State’s office. The testing was conducted on a Pro V&V laptop independent of the system.”

The audit noted that the software and firmware on the sampled machines was verified and it was confirmed that there were no signs of any election hacking or cyber attacks to machines.

Benita M. Dodd, the vice president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, said in an op-ed for Peach Tree Times that the state’s election process was a mess. She opined that the problem was a high number of early voters, either by mail or absentee. 

It has been noted that this year, Georgia’s absentee ballot rejection rate was lower than it ever has been.

There are usually approximately 3% of absentee ballots rejected, but, this year that rate was only .24%

Out of 1,307,472 absentee ballots, there were only 3,152 rejected. In 2016, there were 202,492 absentee ballots and 6,059 rejected. If this year’s numbers had been like 2016, there would have been more than 39,000 rejected ballots.