Cobb County elections officials discovered 18 uncounted ballots from the 2022 elections this week and reported the issue to the State Elections Board, a county spokesman said late Friday afternoon.
Five absentee ballots from the May election and 13 absentee provisional ballots in the November general election were found this week.
“They were uncovered when they were moving items out of one room to another,” said county spokesman Ross Cavitt. “Obviously, the big question is, why were they not counted and processed like all the other ballots?”
While the numbers are not enough to impact any results, “we take this issue very seriously,” Cobb Board of Elections Chairwoman Tori Silas said.
“Following the 2022 election cycle, we made process improvements, including procedures to track and log ballots when they are received by the office,” Silas said in a news release. “The improvements are designed to catch and prevent mistakes such as these.”
The elections department drew scrutiny from voting rights activists, county officials and the public for several errors last year that prompted an internal review and updates to absentee ballot processing.
The board landed in court over an American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia lawsuit last fall that ordered the county to extend the deadline for absentee ballots when more than 1,000 absentee ballots were not mailed out on time.
The board also had to recertify and change the election results in a Kennesaw City Council race after workers found a missing thumb drive of ballots that had not been included in the tally. Other mistakes included various redistricting errors that resulted in some voters receiving the wrong ballots.
In the wake of those blunders, the county elections board conducted a formal review of absentee ballot processing and is implementing several changes recommended by the county’s internal audit team, including automated reporting at several steps in the process and verification to ensure any mistakes are identified quickly.
Former elections director Janine Eveler retired early this year, leaving the department without one until the board appointed an interim director, Gerry Miller to take over while they continued the search for a qualified candidate.
