Georgia counties on Friday will start a rare hand count of the state’s roughly 5 million presidential votes in part of a labor-intensive process that represents uncharted territory in the Peach State.
The state’s mandatory start time for the recount is 9 a.m. Friday, although northern Georgia’s Cobb County and some other areas will begin an hour earlier, election officials said.
“We’ll be counting every single piece of paper, every single ballot, every single lawfully cast, legal ballot,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said. “People will be working lots of overtime in the next coming week.”
In Gwinnett County, more than 416,000 votes must be counted by hand over the course of six days.
County spokesman Joe Sorenson said he wasn’t sure how many officials it would take to complete the task or how long each employee would have to work in order to meet Wednesday’s midnight deadline.
Doing a full audit by hand is more than Georgia law requires. It’s unlikely to swing the state into President Trump’s column because erasing President-elect Joe Biden’s lead would require the discovery of serious flaws in the process that Republicans have yet to prove.
Biden widened his lead Thursday afternoon to 14,072 votes, but because the margin separating the two candidates is still razor-thin, 49.5% to 49.2%, a hand recount was ordered by Raffensperger.
Beginning Friday, votes will be recounted in batches of 100 or less, with a two-person audit board handling each batch. Most counties in Georgia will have multiple audit boards running at once to save time.
Each auditor will work at his or her own table, where staffers will stack the ballots by candidate.
There will be separate stacks for Trump, Biden, Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen, write-in candidates, and ballots with no presidential vote or an “over vote,” in which a voter marks more than one candidate. Both members of the audit team will be counting together to check the accuracy of their counts. After each batch has been completed, vote totals will be logged, and ballots will be moved to secure containers for safekeeping. The audit boards are only checking presidential votes. They won’t be looking at any other races or ballot measures, nor will they be verifying signatures.
Raffensperger, the state’s top election official, has been pressured to resign by Republicans after stating there had been no widespread cases of voter fraud despite what the Trump campaign has repeatedly claimed. On Thursday, his office said he had been sidelined and is in quarantine after his wife tested positive for the coronavirus.
On top of that, Georgia is also preparing for two high-stakes runoff elections on Jan. 5 that will determine which party controls the Senate. Up to $500 million are expected to be funneled into that nine-week sprint.
