No hanging chads marred Fulton County's recount Wednesday of last week's sheriff election, but it still held quiet drama
The computer calculated that Sheriff Ted Jackson again had avoided a runoff election with former Sheriff Richard Lankford by winning 50.05 percent of the vote — the same share reported last week.
But Jackson still may face challenges to the result because of the method of counting. Elections Director Sam Westmoreland said he followed proper procedure. Lankford said that might be a question for the courts to decide.
The law mandated a recount of the sheriff's Democratic primary because the July 31 results had Jackson winning without a runoff by less than 1 percent. The counting took place in a drab warehouse in northwest Atlanta, where about 20 election workers re-fed absentee and qualified provisional ballots into the computer.
But instead of feeding precinct voting machine results directly from memory cards to the computer, Fulton reused master memory cards of the votes from each precinct created by election workers on election night, which may again cloud the result. If the result stands, Jackson's election in November is all but assured because he has no Republican opposition.
Lankford condemned the process — both on election night and at the recount. He contended the result could have been manipulated because in a relatively new vote-counting method election workers removed the memory cards from voting machines to create a master memory card — called an "accumulator" — for each precinct.
Lankford asked officials to feed each voting machine's card separately into the computer. At the very least, officials should have re-created new master memory cards rather than using the old ones, he said.
"Any manual process is not a tamper-proof system," he said. "You're almost at a point that it is not worth running for office in Fulton County because you can't trust the vote counting."
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp doesn't oversee the sheriff election, which is certified by county officials, Kemp spokesman Jared Thomas said.
But Thomas said a proper recount requires officials to do exactly what they did election night — including refeeding voting machine memory cards to accumulators and downloading that to the computer. Lankford agreed.
"Otherwise, if there is an error, you just replicate it," Lankford said.
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