Election officials in Floyd County found about 2,600 new votes during Georgia's recount, according to the county's Republican party chairman. The votes weren't initially recorded and could narrow the gap between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Last week Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Secretary of State for Georgia, ordered a manual hand-recount of all votes as an “audit” of the election results. Thanks to this recount, Floyd County was able to track down and correct “a discrepancy between the number of people who checked in to vote early and ballots that were counted.”
“The problem occurred because county election officials didn’t upload votes from a memory card in an ballot scanning machine. ... The issue appeared to occur on an optical scanner that stopped working after a couple of weeks of early voting ... County election officials were supposed to rescan all paper ballots cast on that machine, but roughly half of them weren’t recorded.”
Of the new votes, 1,643 were for Trump and 865 were for Biden. A bit ironic, considering Trump is the one who’s been screaming about how “finding” new votes is obvious fraud. It’s not. (It’s also not enough to change the outcome.)
Note that this was not a problem with a voting machine: “It’s not an equipment issue. It’s a person not executing their job properly.” The state’s voting system manager has called for the resignation of Floyd County’s elections director. Importantly, thought, this means there was no mechanical or software flaw that might have caused the same problem elsewhere in the state. As the chairman of the Floyd County Republican Party confirmed:
“It’s very concerning, but this doesn’t appear to be a widespread issue. I’m glad the audit revealed it, and it’s important that all votes are counted.”
Evidently Martin isn’t one of those “STOP THE COUNT!” Republicans.