A statewide ballot review will get under way this morning, and elections officials across Georgia will begin reviewing the Secretary of State’s race results by hand. Georgia elections officials launched the statewide Risk Limiting Audit of the 2022 General Election Wednesday at the Capitol, using the roll of dice to determine which batches of ballots will be reviewed.
The audit is designed to check whether machine counts of ballots match hand tallies in order to show if the outcome was accurate. During a press conference in the Capitol, officials used 20 specially-designed 10-sided dice to create a random 20-digit number that was fed into computers to select ballot batches that will be pulled in all 159 Georgia counties. Information on the date, time, and location of each county’s audit is required by law to be posted on each county’s website. The audit could possibly finish Friday.
The dice were rolled by 20 different individuals, called on by elections officials.
Under state law, the Secretary of State’s office is required by law to perform an audit of one race every two years, and Raffensperger decided to check his own win over Democrat Bee Nguyen. He said he chose his own race in the interest of transparency. It was the largest margin of victory in any statewide race, at 9.3 percentage points.
“I believe in transparency and accountability to voters, and that’s why I’ve chosen this race,” Raffensperger said. He won his reelection race against Nguyen with a little more than 53 percent of the vote.
The Secretary of State declined to audit the race for the U.S. Senate race between Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker which resulted in a December 6th runoff. Raffensperger said it would require election workers to review a huge number of ballots by hand while also preparing for the runoff.
“As part of the process to make elections boring again, we are here today to launch the statewide audit,” said Gabe Sterling, Chief Operating Officer for the Secretary of State’s office. “We do believe this audit is an important part of keeping that faith alive and regaining the public’s trust in elections.”
Sterling also said that this audit is an important part of the system, “when you have a paper based system like we have in Georgia.”
This will be Georgia’s second statewide election audit, but it will be different than the ballot review in 2020, which recounted all 5 million ballots cast in the presidential election to determine that Democrat Joe Biden had in fact defeated Republican Donald Trump by about 12,000 votes. The total recount was the result of such a slim margin of victory, Sterling said,
This time, as many as 300,000 ballots will be reviewed to ascertain with a 95 percent confidence level that the outcome of the race was correct, according to Sterling.
Earlier this week, the Carter Center announced it will observe the risk-limiting audit of the Secretary of State race. The organization will send about 50 observers to county audit boards throughout the state to watch the auditing process. The observers will document key processes and procedures, noting what worked well and what could be improved, according to officials with the Carter Center.
