ATLANTA (NewsNation Now) — Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger held a news conference Wednesday morning to address delays, confusion, and technical glitches in the state’s vote-counting process. He assured that all ballots will be counted Wednesday.
“My team has set reminders to counters to get all, I repeat all of our results counted today. Every legal vote will count,” Raffensperger said.
Raffensperger projects about 200,000 ballots still need to be counted. That number comes from three counties in the state.
“52 to 54,000 ballots in Dekalb county, 74,000 Fulton county absentees, 43,000 early votes in Fulton county, and 7,000 Forsythe county votes still need to be counted,” Raffensperger confirmed.
The Associated Press has not declared a winner in Georgia’s presidential contest because the race between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden is too early to call, with outstanding ballots left to be counted in counties where Biden has performed well.
NewsNation’s television broadcast and digital properties relies on the AP for all vote counting and race calls. NewsNation chose to rely on the AP because they call races based on the facts.
In Gwinnett County, one of Georgia’s largest counties, a software problem interfered with the way thousands of mailed absentee ballots are scanned in batches, county officials said.
Some of those ballots will now go through a process known as adjudication, where a 3-person panel that includes representatives of both major parties try to determine the voter’s intent, county spokesman Joe Sorenson said in an email early Wednesday.
In the metro Atlanta county of DeKalb — also of the state’s largest counties — officials will resume processing absentee ballots at 11 a.m. Wednesday, the county said in a statement released after midnight.
Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, also stopped counting, but resumed the process at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt said. She said earlier that the county plans to resume tallying absentee ballots “over the next two days.
In Cobb County, also in metro Atlanta, approximately 15,000 absentee ballots remain to be processed on Wednesday or Thursday, Cobb County Elections Director Janine Eveler said Wednesday morning. Then, on Friday, the county plans to process another 882 provisional ballots along with any military and overseas ballots and any ballots with missing or mismatched signatures that have been corrected.