Georgia officials found an additional 2,600 ballots that had not been counted from Floyd County after conducting a hand recount, which will likely reduce Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s lead over President Donald Trump.
Georgia’s voting implementation manager Gabriel Sterling chalked the missed ballots up to human error.
“Well what it is, is they had these ballots in their ballot manifests, they had them there and they were counted in the audit. When they finished the audit, they had like 40,000 votes, when on the election night reporting they only had 38,000 votes, and that’s how it was discovered,” Sterling explained, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “So that’s where we came across this, and then they kinda back-figured that they came from those early vote results that were not uploaded. But that’s where we’re having an investigator to button up exactly where their breakdown came.”
Sterling called this mishap an “amazing blunder” that was only possible became someone didn’t upload the ballot count from a memory card into a ballot machine.
“It’s not an equipment issue. It’s a person not executing their job properly. This is the kind of situation that requires a change at the top of their management side,” he said.
Out of the ballots found, 1,643 were new votes for Trump and 865 were votes for Biden, which gives the president a boost in the narrow race.
These new results, however, will not be enough to change the outcome, according to Sterling.
Luke Martin, chairman of the Floyd County Republican Party, called the news “very concerning,” even if it not “a widespread issue.”
Floyd County’s missing ballot seems to be the most significant issue found during Georgia’s recount.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the other counties’ recounted figures closely match the numbers submitted during the week of the election.
