A hand-count audit of Georgia’s presidential election reported miniscule discrepancies from the machine count, confirming President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.
The results of the manual review released Wednesday showed 11 more votes for Trump and six fewer for Harris out of nearly 750,000 ballots reviewed by election officials across the state.
“Georgia’s election systems are our nation’s best,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said. “This audit shows that our system works and that our county election officials conducted a secure, accurate election — they are the cream of the crop.”
The tiny difference between the two ballot counts was largely caused by human error during the hand-counting process, Raffensperger said.
Credit: File
Credit: File
The manual review of a sample of ballots compared the results with the machine count to verify the outcome was correct with a high degree of certainty. The audit included about 14% of all ballots cast.
In all, Trump defeated Harris by 115,000 votes out of more than 5.25 million ballots cast in the presidential election — a 2.2 percentage point margin of victory.
The manual review of a sample of ballots compared the results with the machine count to verify the outcome was correct with at least a 95% statistical confidence level.
Georgia’s voting system relies on optical scanning machines to count votes from QR codes printed on ballots. The printed ballots also include readable text of each voter’s choices. Election workers counted the printed text to confirm the results matched the computer-generated results.
Georgia is one of five states that conduct this type of audit, called a risk-limiting audit, after each election. State law has required audits since 2020.
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
The audit began at the state Capitol last week, when state election officials and volunteers rolled 10-sided dice to create a random 20-digit number. That number was then fed into a computer to pick which ballots needed to be reviewed in each of Georgia’s 159 counties.
County election officials audited 442 batches of ballots, including ballots printed by machines for in-person voters and filled out by hand by absentee voters. Over 86% of the batches had no deviation from the machine-counted totals.
Election officials also conducted a hand-count audit of the 2020 race, but that review covered all 5 million ballots cast because the margin was so close between Trump and Joe Biden. After the audit and a machine recount, Biden won by 11,779 votes.
A second election audit is being completed this week to ensure that the results are correct before Raffensperger certifies the results Friday.
This new audit — a computerized double-check added to state law this year — uses text-recognition technology to read candidate names printed on every ballot cast in Georgia, then counts the totals. Those numbers will be compared with vote counts from election night, which were generated from QR codes printed on ballots.
