Members Present: Andy Thomas, Paula Scott, Robert Tanner, Troy Schley were present.
Matthew McCullough was absent.
The Board voted to certify
No objections necessarily, but two candidates were present. One candidate raised that she should have been a certified write-in candidate, but the board of elections said that she did not provide a notice of publication and rejected her candidacy. She came to the meeting with newspaper in hand — she published but perhaps the newspaper/she did not submit an affidavit of publication. Another candidate noted that the total number of votes cast for Douglas ward 2 city council didn’t add up, and the 30-odd vote discrepancy could be the difference between a run-off. The Board thinks that the discrepancy is from people voting in other races but not voting in the ward 2 race, and promised to look into it further. (Audit coming on Monday of next week)
1) There was a 5 voter difference between the poll tab and the scanner in reconciliation. Board staff says that this is likely due to a lag in uploading data from the county to the state — evidently there was a delay in the upload due to high volume statewide, so board staff were told by the SoS to leave the upload running overnight to catch up. Note: this reconciliation issue has been noted in the past. A person in attendance, Kathryn Grant (404-759-9959) says that she has brought reconciliation discrepancies up several times over past election cycles.
2) Ballots with a write-in are automatically placed in a specific container that fills up quickly, and in a messy fashion. Board staff had to rearrange each ballot and count by hand. Unclear whether that meant that all regular, non-write-in votes on the same ballot also had to be counted by hand, but either way, seems like a systemic issue. Board staff handled, but seemed like there was no protocol here.
*These meeting notes were prepared by a volunteer
These meetings are open to the public by Georgia law.
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