Georgia’s secretary of state opened an investigation into how Coffee County, a small county in southern Georgia, handled its certification of the 2020 presidential election recount.
Georgia counties were supposed to complete their second recount by Dec. 2 at midnight. By Thursday, six counties were still finalizing their recount results, and Coffee County officials “were working with the Secretary of State’s office and Dominion Voting Systems to resolve a discrepancy of 50 votes,” according to a press release.
By Friday, Coffee County still had not certified its recount, and county officials sent a letter to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger saying that the county “cannot certify the electronic recount numbers given its inability to repeatably duplicate credible election results,” according to WALB 10. The county would instead vote to certify the results from the election night report.
Coffee County Election Director Misty Martin told the state election board that “the hand audit showed that they were off by 1 vote from the original count, but now, following the recount, Coffee County’s tally was off by 51 votes.”
“Further, the county’s tally was showing two batch uploads of 50 ballots each,” a statement from Raffensperger’s office read. “It became apparent that Ms. Martin was unsure whether she had scanned a batch of 50 ballots twice, which would account for the 50-vote discrepancy (Ms. Martin also noted that Coffee County had comingled their Advance Voting and Election Day ballots, adding further disorganization to the process). Again, though she could not say for certain that she had scanned the same batch of 50 ballots twice, that seemed a likely possibility.”
According to Raffensperger’s office, Coffee County did submit the data from the mechanical recount with documentation from its election management system “to back up their uploaded results.”
“Every other county was able to complete this task within the given time limits,” Raffensberger’s office wrote. “In some cases, counties realized they made mistakes in scanning ballots and had to rescan, or realized they neglected to scan some ballots and had to correct that error. But nonetheless, those counties completed the recount on time. The Secretary of State’s office will investigate Coffee County for their recount procedures and ascertain if the case needs to be brought to the State Election Board for review and potential action.”
President Trump and his allies have repeatedly accused Dominion Voting Systems, which had equipment used in states across the country for the 2020 election, of being involved in voter fraud. The company has denied the claims and pointed to a joint statement released by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security that asserted the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” adding that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
