With Georgians casting their ballots for the 2024 general election, I want to remind voters that their votes will be counted, their ballots are genuine and that the election system in Georgia is secure.
If one believes the polls, by all appearances the race at the top of the ticket appears to be tied — or at least too close to make any sort of meaningful prediction — other than that about half the voters in Georgia will be disappointed and about half them will be elated. But no matter which side of the partisan divide a voter might be on, every voter in our state should know that the results will be valid because the election is secure.
Election security begins with highly accurate voter registration lists — and to even get on that list Georgia verifies the U.S. citizenship of everyone attempting to register to vote. Through the Georgia Department of Driver Services and through the federally secured Systematic Alien Verification of Entitlements database administered by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, we cross-check new registrant applications. Noncitizens cannot vote in Georgia. Registering to vote or even attempting to register to vote as a noncitizen is a felony under both federal and state law and carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Voter roll maintenance is conducted daily, and systematic list maintenance occurs frequently except for a 90-day window before a federal election, pursuant to the National Voter Registration Act. Elections officials regularly check the Social Security Death Master File; the National Change of Address records maintained by the U.S. Postal Service; Department of Corrections records to see if any registered voter has become a felon; the Electronic Record Information Center to see if a voter has obtained a driver’s license or registered in another state; and Georgia’s bilateral agreements to share registration data with every state and the District of Columbia.
Voters casting any type of ballot in Georgia (including absentee-by-mail ballots) are required to show a government-issued identification and sign an oath. Local election officials match the photo ID before issuing a ballot to the voter. With this process, no unregistered person can cast a ballot anywhere in Georgia.
When voters check in to vote in person, they are requesting a ballot, and election officials keep a record of that request. After voters have marked their choices on the paper ballot, they cast it. Election officials compare the number of people who have checked in and requested a ballot with the number of ballots that have been cast to ensure the numbers reconcile.
The reconciliation process of checking voter credit against ballots cast occurs at every early-voting location and every election-day precinct in Georgia. Ballots that become damaged or spoiled or get stuck in a machine must be accounted for as well.
A quick note about ballots in Georgia: They are all printed on paper, a special paper with security features built into the fibers of the ballot. Election workers in Georgia can use a handheld scanner to detect the presence of security features woven into the fibers of the ballot itself to detect any counterfeit ballots. This year, all Georgia ballots also have a unique watermark to visually identify any attempt to create a phony ballot.
This also means that there’s no such thing as a single “Georgia ballot.” Georgia has thousands of different versions of ballots this election, each one containing specific combinations of county commissioners, district attorneys, judges, county commissioners, state representatives, state senators and congressional candidates are also on “the” ballot. There also might be a local referendum, a bond issue or a local option sales tax.
These variations make attempts to create fraudulent Georgia ballots very difficult.
Georgia voters voting in person use a machine to mark their ballots, ensuring consistent readability of the ballot during the counting process. Ballots marked by hand have more errors than ballots marked by a machine — a well-known fact in the election world, and one reason former Secretary of State Cathy Cox pushed to use a Direct Recording Electronic voting system in 2002. Current ballots have human-readable text that voters review to double-check their choices before turning in their ballots to be counted.
Election night will be busy for election workers across the state. Not only will they be counting votes, but they also will be accounting for ballots — to reconcile that the number of ballots issued to voters matches the number of ballots returned.
(That “match” by the way, is not always the same number; there are always a few special circumstances in which a voter might request an absentee by mail ballot and then change their mind and decide to vote in person. Their absentee ballot might not arrive at their house on time. The voter might have died before returning their ballot. Local election officials make sure that every ballot that was requested has either a corresponding ballot being returned or an explanation as to why it wasn’t.)
These procedures will be taking place in each one of Georgia’s 159 counties for the early-voting period and on Election Day.
The fact that elections are administered at the county level in Georgia is another factor protecting elections against widespread fraud. Anyone attempting to tamper with Georgia voting machines at a scale large enough to affect the outcome of the election has to get to the right number of the more than 40,000 pieces of equipment spread out all over the state that we use, get undetected access to a sufficient number of voting machines, tamper with them enough to guarantee their desired outcome but not enough to raise suspicion, and get out undetected.
Though Tom Cruise can make things like that happen in the “Mission Impossible” movies, in the real world that’s not likely.
Every piece of election equipment in Georgia has undergone logic and accuracy testing before being used in a live election. In addition, we will be pulling some equipment out of service and testing it for any changes in software or functionality in the hardware during the voting period. My office is among the first in the nation to use this “parallel testing” step to provide an additional level of security to our elections.
Once the voting is over and the results have been certified, we can go back and do a recount should that prove necessary, and we will perform a risk-limiting audit to verify that the election results are accurate. A risk-limiting audit is a manual count of a statistically significant number of ballots to confirm that the correct person won the selected contest. We did one after the 2020 election, and we have done one in every federal election in Georgia since.
I want to remind anyone who might be nervous or suspicious of elections in Georgia that your election workers are hardworking public servants who do their absolute best under intense public scrutiny and on tight deadlines. They are people who live and work and worship in the very communities you live in. They have their eyes on the process, and, if something out of the ordinary happens, they notice.
There are thousands of hardworking election professionals across the state who make up your last and best line of defense in making Georgia elections secure.
Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, is the Georgia secretary of state.
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