The first county in metro Atlanta has certified the results of its midterm election.
Cobb County's elections board voted Monday to certify the more than 310,000 ballots cast — that's 64 percent of the county's registered voters.
The board also decided on its outstanding ballots, many of them provisional. They approved 1,432 of them and rejected 829 others.
Most of 829 ballots were submitted by people who are not properly registered to vote or are not registered in Cobb, county elections director Janine Eveler said.
An additional 23 ballots were rejected due to signature mismatch issues. Eveler said her office reached out to those people to give them an opportunity to come forward and prove themselves as eligible to vote, but no had done so by Monday’s board action.
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In all, she said, her office checked 2,284 ballots since the polls closed Tuesday.
A local elections board certifying a race is typically a formality to what is usually a foregone conclusion. But this election has been anything but.
Lawsuits and accusations of voter fraud and suppression have swarmed close races in Georgia and nearby Florida.
Democrat Stacey Abrams got about 30,000 more votes than Republican Brian Kemp in Cobb, and the county voted Democratic in every statewide race even, though Kemp appears to have won the state. Kemp has started his transition to become governor, but Abrams has said she will fight until every vote is counted, filing lawsuits to make sure of that.
Eveler doesn’t anticipate any lawsuits filed over Cobb County’s results, “but I understand that that’s sort of where it’s going right now.”
No one showed up Monday at Cobb’s elections board meeting opposing or asking to delay the certification.
Eveler and her staff haven’t had a day off in two weeks and she hasn’t followed much of the news, “so I don’t know what’s out there, but we did the best that we can and if there are questions, we’ll answer them,” she said.
The rest of metro Atlanta’s core counties are set to certify their votes on Tuesday, the state mandated deadline.
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