Georgia Election: Officials say to expect voting results much earlier this year

ATLANTA — Georgia election officials expect to report results from millions of voters within an hour after polls close on Tuesday.

Counties across Georgia must report data on early and absentee voting to the Secretary of State by 8 p.m.

Counties are expected to be ready to tabulate the vast majority of those early votes as soon as the polls close at 7 p.m.

“Come eight o’clock tomorrow night, we may have a very good picture of what the results might be,” Georgia Deputy Elections Director Micheal Barnes said.

The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office said 4,004,588 voters have cast ballots either by voting early or absentee by mail. That accounts for 55.3% of registered voters in Georgia already voted.

State law allowed county election officials to start processing absentee ballots, batch them, and scan them two weeks ago. They cannot tabulate them until after the polls close.

Election officials can start working on early in-person votes when polls open at 7 a.m.

Starting at 7 p.m., they can put those memory cards in for tabulation.

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“Really the big dumps will come early as opposed to late. At least that’s our anticipation,” Barnes said.

That’s a big difference from 2020 when late-night counting and reporting of absentee ballots in major counties caused controversy.

In that election at the height of the pandemic, more than 1 million Georgians voted by absentee ballot.

This year, just a fraction of that number is voting absentee, and changes to the law allow for earlier processing of those ballots.

“We had such a large amount of mail-in absentees that had to be processed. And that’s what lingered into the late overnight hours,” Barnes said.

Paulding County Elections Director Deidre Holden took Channel 2 investigative reporter Justin Gray behind locked doors at the county’s election management system to see how votes are tabulated.

The locked room contains scanners for absentee ballots and a desktop computer that is not hooked up to the internet.

Memory cards and backup tape logs are delivered in sealed packages by teams of two from each polling place and entered into the tabulation computer.

“There’s a chain of custody. Those memory cards are the key component to this election. And we guard those with everything we have,” Holden said.

The State Election Board passed a rule in September that would require poll workers to hand count the paper ballots at the polling locations. A judge blocked that rule in October.

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