Fulton, still counting ballots, may have violated law

Fulton County elections officials may have violated state law when they sent their weary poll workers home early Wednesday morning before they had finished counting 30,000 absentee ballots.

Secretary of State Karen Handel told WAGA-TV Fox 5 that the county had violated election law by allowing its workers to go home before the count was completed after polls closed Tuesday. Under state law, workers involved in counting absentee ballots are required to be sequestered.

The vote count resumed Wednesday and continued into Thursday morning. Officials hoped to have the count completed by 8 a.m.

A state elections official was on hand Wednesday night to monitor the process as the count appeared to be dragging on into a third day.

On Election Day, county election workers began arriving at 5:30 a.m. They were sent home around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, county election officials said. Four hours later, they returned and resumed counting.

Mark Henderson, Fulton’s election education coordinator, said the workers needed to rest, and Fulton county commissioners made the call to send them home.

“The county attorney’s interpretation of the election law is that the workers weren’t required to stay,” Henderson said. “The decision was based on how efficient the staff would’ve been after 23 hours of working.”

Handel spokesman Matt Carrothers could not be reached for comment late Wednesday night, but Handel told Fox 5 News that the nearly 90 county election workers were told to remain at the northwest Atlanta location until they finished Tuesday night’s work.

“We’ll take this up with the [Georgia] Election Commission,” she said.

At midnight Wednesday, Fulton elections employees and staff volunteers continued counting absentee ballots, feeding the paper ballots into optical scanners. By midnight only about half of those workers remained.

Fulton is the only county with numerous ballots outstanding.

Handel told Fox 5 News that Fulton knew in advance how many ballots it had to count and should have been staffed to finish the work without having to send workers home overnight.

“What is most disconcerting is they called and asked if they should stay and were told to stay, but they chose to leave,” Handel told Fox 5 News.