Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts has had practice telling reporters that Georgia’s most-populated county was almost done counting ballots — because he has been doing it for four days.
“The fat lady has almost sung,” he told a group assembled at Fulton’s elections warehouse about 6:20 p.m.
Behind him, workers were finishing counting the last 3,612 provisional ballots and less than 900 military/overseas ballots.
Fulton elections head Richard Barron said the final tally should be live when folks wake up Saturday.
The results are already live for the 315,000 who voted early in person, the 145,000 who voted absentee by mail, and the just under 60,000 voted on Election Day.
It’s been a process to get all those ballots tallied.
Many Fulton residents woke up Wednesday morning to a full count of the county’s day-of and early votes, but results from only about half of the absentee ballots were online.
There were issues with counting absentee-by-mail ballots, including at least a two-hour delay early Tuesday after a water pipe burst in a room with ballots in State Farm Arena.
As other states margins narrowed, it became clear that the remaining 74,000 ballots in the Democratic stronghold that is Fulton might help get former Vice President Joe Biden into the White House.
National media descended upon Fulton County along with reporters from Europe.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa.Pointer@ajc.com
Credit: Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa.Pointer@ajc.com
At 1 p.m. Thursday, Barron told a crowd of nearly 100 journalists in the ballot-processing operation at State Farm Arena that Fulton had finished processing the mail-in ballots.
From there, ballots were scanned and those that couldn’t be scanned went through a bipartisan process to determine the voter’s intent before their results appeared online.
Crews spent Friday processing provisional ballots, mostly from people who voted at the wrong precinct, and the military/overseas ballots — both of which the county was required to accept until 5 p.m. Friday.
Pitts said he was pleased with their performance and was ready for runoffs to decide both of Georgia’s senators.
But not so fast: Early voting for the runoff election to fill the remaining month of the late Civil Rights icon Rep. John Lewis begins Monday.
Credit: WSBTV Videos
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