Election workers in Fulton County initially failed to count 1,326 votes during the 2022 primary because they weren’t loaded from memory cards, according to an investigation report.
The State Election Board reprimanded the county, which corrected its vote totals and recertified the election in June 2022. The discrepancy didn’t change the outcome of any races.
The investigation report was obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week through a request under the Georgia Open Records Act.
Votes from seven memory cards, which store votes from ballot scanning machines, weren’t recorded on election night, the report said. Either an election worker didn’t click on the correct box to load results, memory cards were removed from computers prematurely, or there was an unknown technical error.
“The exact cause could not be determined, but it is believed that human error during the (vote) extraction process was the most likely cause,” the report said. “Fulton County elections instituted a new procedure ... to ensure that all precincts and tabulators that were created on the election management system have also had their results uploaded.”
The secretary of state’s office detected the problem because one precinct showed zero votes cast, raising a “red flag,” the investigation report said.
Fulton Elections Director Nadine Williams said these kinds of problems won’t happen again.
“We have put processes in place. There’s at least two different layers of reconciliation to make sure we identify this problem to ensure it doesn’t reoccur,” Williams told the State Election Board at its Feb. 13 meeting. “We are triple-checking ... to make sure that memory card is captured and uploaded.”
State Election Board member Sara Tindall Ghazal said county election offices need to ensure that voting data is correct. There was a similar issue in Cobb County with a memory card that wasn’t loaded correctly in November 2022, changing the results of a Kennesaw City Council election.
“Obviously that really undermines voter and public confidence in the process,” Ghazal said at the February meeting.
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