Georgia will count their ballots for the third time following a request from the Trump campaign, but this time, the tabulation of the votes will be done on a machine rather than by hand.
According to NPR, election workers previously recounted votes by hand as part of a statewide risk-limiting audit intended to ensure the voting machines accurately calculated the ballots. Now, they can move forward with the sole use of the scanners.
“When we did the hand audit, the hope was that common sense would prevail, and they would say, ‘Okay, we’ve seen now the machines counted properly and we won’t do that,’” said Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager.
Though the voting machines are quicker and more accurate than the hand-audits, Sterling warns there may still be potential delays in the process considering Thanksgiving and the Senate elections are approaching.
“With Thanksgiving in the middle of the week, it kind of the throws the ability to get this done really, really fast,” he said. “At the same time that they’re doing all this, there are counties in the state that literally have elections on Tuesday, and they’re doing early voting starting tomorrow.”
Georgia’s third recount comes at the request of Trump’s campaign who have made claims of widespread fraud and irregularities in voting results since Election Day. Despite confirmation of Biden’s win by over 12,000 votes, the president’s team has requested another tabulation of the votes as the margin of victory is a little over 2 percent, which is within the percentage points required for a recount to be considered.
Trump’s campaign has consistently called for signature matching on absentee ballots though they have been repeatedly told ballots were separated from envelopes to protect voters’ privacy.
An official start date for the recount has yet to be determined as officials are still figuring out the logistics of another calculation. The office of Georgia’s secretary of state, however, intends on setting a deadline for the completion of the ballot counting.