Cobb County election officials say they will take steps to address the administrative miscues that led to 1,000 absentee ballots not being mailed on time in the November election.
The county’s audit department conducted a review of the elections division’s absentee ballot processing and made several recommendations to the Board of Elections on Monday, including automated reporting at several steps in the process and verification to ensure any mistakes are identified quickly.
Last November, the elections division failed to mail over 1,000 ballots on time to voters, an error made by an employee, elections officials said. But the mistake was not discovered until weeks later. Amid the fallout, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of several absentee voters, and a judge agreed to extend the deadline to accept absentee ballots.
Elections Chairwoman Tori Silas said she is confident that the changes will help prevent a similar error from occurring again by helping the department identify ballot processing mistakes more quickly.
“There’s one factor that’s always present, and that’s the possibility of human error,” Silas said. “You can’t really control for that, but the things that we can try to control for, with regard to process and procedure — that’s what we’re looking at.”
Credit: Jenni Girtman for the AJC
Credit: Jenni Girtman for the AJC
The recommended changes include automating reports at multiple steps in the ballot process, which the county’s existing elections software allows them to do. Auditors also recommend logging the number of ballots as they are returned; securing ballots within the absentee ballot department; and logging ballot counts at each step on a daily basis with employee initials and supervisor verification.
Latona Thomas, director of the county’s Internal Audit Department, presented the report to the Board of Elections this week after conducting the review.
“The overall internal control environment over absentee (ballots) will be stronger once they implement a lot of the recommendations,” she said. “In a lot of cases, there wasn’t anything in place, or if they had something (logged) manually, we’re recommending that it be automated.”
The department is also hiring an absentee ballot manager that will “be a part of the implementation of those recommendations,” Silas said.
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