The State Election Board has ordered all ballots to be hand-counted on Election Day, which will change how Oglethorpe County election officials do their jobs on Nov. 5.
“I don’t know how long it will take,” said Steve McCannon, Oglethorpe County Board of Elections election assistant. “It just depends on how many ballots are in those scanners at 7 p.m. on Election Day.”
Votes are usually counted digitally using the state’s voting machines. Early and absentee ballots are processed in advance, while in-person votes are copied to memory cards and saved on a hard drive.
The cards are then uploaded to the Results Tallying and Reporting (RTR) system.
The addition of hand counting, decided by a State Election Board vote of 3-2, requires a poll manager and two poll officers in each precinct to take the ballots out of the scanners and count to verify that the amount of ballots is the same number measured on the tabulator on Election Day.
The rule does not apply to the advance voting period.
“They’re going to count the number of pieces of ballots,” McCannon said. “They’re not actually counting votes.”
Oglethorpe County has 5-6 poll workers, including board of election members, spread across the three polling locations for Election Day.
McCannon said it will only take an “extra 30 minutes” to hand count for Oglethorpe County.
However, the Democratic National Committee and the Georgia Democratic Party have filed a lawsuit against the board arguing that it “changes the rules of the game in the ninth inning.”
Jane Kidd, chair of the Oglethorpe Democrats, encouraged Oglethorpe County residents to vote early, no matter their party affiliation.
“We feel like that is the best way to go for voting any way, and we encourage it all the time,” she said. “We feel confident in the integrity of the Oglethorpe County Board of Elections and how they do things.”
As of Sept. 29, Georgia had 7,089,560 active, registered voters. Oglethorpe accounts for 11,199 or 0.16% active voters, according to the Georgia Secretary of State.