Bibb County elections supervisor plans to comply with state’s new rule on hand-counting ballots
Local elections supervisors across Georgia may have some extra work to do after the polls close Nov. 5 as a new rule adopted by the State Board of Elections requires counties to count all ballots by hand.
The new rule the board approved in late September is being challenged in the Superior Court of Fulton County by the Democratic National Committee and the Georgia Democratic Party.
In the meantime, Macon-Bibb County’s Board of Elections Supervisor Tom Gillon is making plans to comply with the added work on election night.
“We’re just figuring out what is the best way to get it done, whether we want to use poll workers that have been working that day or if we want to bring in some extra folks at the end,” Gillon said of the new requirement to count tens of thousands of ballots by hand. “It’s not as bad as it could be, but we’re still asking that of people who’ve been working 14 hours, so there’s been some criticism of the rule.”
Gillon said the new rule does not solve any problems the Macon-Bibb County elections office has had in the past.
“We’ve not had that many problems at all, but I don’t think this is a solution for anything we’ve dealt with,” he said. “Maybe there’s some county or counties where there was an issue with the number of ballots they had versus how many they said they had.”
Regardless of the outcome in court, the state still requires elections offices to take multiple measures to ensure accuracy and integrity.
Each voter already leaves a three-point trail of data each time they cast a ballot.
First, voters sign in on a tablet, have their driver’s license or state-issued identification card scanned and receive a plastic card with a computer chip.
Next, the voter takes the plastic card to the ballot marking device, a larger touch screen computer into which the voter inserts the card and selects their choices. Then, the machine prints a paper ballot.
Finally, the voter takes the paper ballot to a large machine called a tabulator and returns the plastic card to a poll worker. The voter feeds the paper ballot into the tabulator, which takes a digital image of the ballot and stores it.
When all is said and done, elections offices have recorded the number of voters on the poll pads, the number of votes cast on ballot marking devices and the number of paper ballots fed into the tabulator. All three figures should match.
“There may be reasons why it is one or two off, legitimately, but everybody should know why they are,” Gillon said.
For example, small discrepancies occur occasionally as a voter disputes the ballot they received and requests another one to be printed. In that case, the old ballot would be “spoiled,” two will have been printed but the tabulator will only have counted one.
“If there’s any question about whether there was any shenanigans or malfeasance or whatever, we can hand count the actual votes afterwards,” Gillon said.
The new rule requiring a hand count is another responsibility elections offices have been saddled with in recent years. Since 2020, elections offices statewide have been required to conduct a “risk-limiting audit” within two days of the election.
Gillon said poll workers will select a couple of precincts and batches of absentee ballots, choose a particular race and hand-count that race by reading text on the ballots to ensure the tabulator, which reads QR codes but ignores text, comes up with the same results.
Macon-Bibb County has about 117,00 registered voters this year and 31 polling places, Gillon said. That’s about 30,000 more registered voters compared to 2016, when voter turnout was about 73%. In 2020, the county closed two polling places and voter turnout for its nearly 108,000 voters was about 66%, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.
Gillon said poor voter turnout in previous elections has made for a quicker auditing process, but he expects this election will “probably take a bit longer” to hand-count as a greater number of voters is expected at the polls.
In 2022, the elections office started having couriers drive the memory cards from tabulators at each polling place to the elections office to be counted. Previously, that work was completed at the polling places and took longer to report back to the main office.
“If we can be done by 10 o’clock, that’s usually awesome,” Gillon said.
