Here’s Exactly How Election Offices Count Georgians’ Votes

This coverage is made possible by Votebeat, a nonpartisan reporting project covering local election integrity and voting access. The article is available for reprint under the terms of Votebeat’s republishing policy. 

Georgia is having an eventful election season, with a pandemic, a hurricane and a brand new voting system—and record early turnout. 

All those votes have to be counted, and while they can’t actually be tallied up until election night, officials in Georgia have been able to jump-start the process. 

Processing and Counting Mail-In Ballots

A new law let counties start processing absentee ballots two weeks before Election Day. In the presence of three election officials, the ballots can be removed from their envelopes and scanned. The Secretary of State’s office told Votebeat that all the counties got more high-speed scanners in anticipation of an influx of mail-in ballots due to the pandemic. On election night, all that should remain is to tabulate the votes, which is a quick and automated process. 

Any registered voter in Georgia could request an absentee ballot, and it must be received by the county before polls close on Election Day—a deadline that has been reinstated after a court battle to extend it by several days. 

Election officials compare the signature on the ballot envelope to the person’s signature on their voter registration card and their absentee ballot application. If the signatures don’t match, or if the ballot signature is missing, the county has to tell the voter about the problem—which the voter can fix. They have to send back an affidavit and a copy of their ID. 

Counting In-Person Ballots

When voting early in-person, Georgians were technically voting “absentee.” On Friday afternoon, the last scheduled day of advance voting in Georgia, the wait to vote was long, partly because of delays caused by Hurricane Zeta. 

It’s the first general election in which Georgia residents are voting on new voting equipment, which the state purchased for more than $100 million. Unlike in most states, where the voting equipment varies county by county, all Georgia counties use the same devices, made by Dominion Voting Systems. The system is made up of so-called “ballot-marking devices,” which have the voter make their choices on a touchscreen. The machine spits out a printed list of the voter’s selections, which they can review. However, the system prints a special QR code next to that list to actually indicate their vote, a feature voters can’t easily verify, which has been fiercely criticized in Georgia and in other states that use the devices. 

The voter later places the printout in another machine, which both scans and tabulates the votes right at the polling location, the Secretary of State’s office told Votebeat. The system now ensures that there’s a paper record for every vote, something that the state’s previous system was lacking. 

But the new technology doesn’t necessarily mean smooth sailing—the state rushed to install the machines, and in Georgia’s June primary, the system repeatedly glitched, and has been criticized as bloated and overly complex. 

Tabulating and Reporting Results

Like the mail-in votes, absentee in-person votes cannot be actually tallied until Election Day. In Cobb County, to take one example, they are stored on memory cards until Election Day, when they will be counted, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Because so many ballots will have been pre-processed, election officials expect that they’ll be able to quickly tabulate and report all those votes that came in early.

As for the votes cast on Election Day, in Cobb County, for example, election workers gather memory cards from the scanners to bring them to the county office, where they are all tabulated together, according to the Journal-Constitution. Then they are saved to a flash drive, which in turn is burned to a CD, which is later put into a computer with an internet connection that uploads the vote tallies to the Secretary of State’s website.

The Secretary of State’s office told Votebeat that its officials look at the incoming figures for any anomalies, a manual verification process. What the public sees on election night are unofficial results. 

To complete the election process, a new state law requires Georgia to conduct a “risk-limiting audit”—which the state could not have done with its old voting system because it didn’t include a paper record for every vote. The audit verifies a statistically significant sample of the ballots to make sure they were counted correctly. The lengthy, painstaking process is a sign of the care and safeguards necessary for a free and fair election.