Secretary of State’s Office: No major problems at polls despite Trump claims

ATLANTA — Georgia election officials said they had no major problems at voting locations in Georgia’s 159 counties on Election Day.

Just like we did on Election Day in November, Channel 2 Action News has spent the day with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his office.

Channel 2 investigator reporter Justin Gray is at the office’s command center.

[SPECIAL SECTION: Election 2020]

We’ll have LIVE election coverage beginning at 8 p.m. on Channel 2 Action News and WSB Now – it’s free on your Roku, Amazon Fire or Apple TV as well as your WSB-TV News App.

Officials told Gray the only “minor issue” Tuesday was in Columbia County, where a programming error forced them to start the morning using backup emergency ballots.

President Donald Trump tweeted “Reports are coming out of the 12th Congressional District of Georgia that Dominion Machines are not working in certain Republican Strongholds.”

State officials disputed the president’s tweet and said everyone was able to cast a ballot.

“If they couldn’t get the poll worker cards to work as well then they used the emergency ballots, put them in the emergency bin,” voting implementation manager Gabriel Sterling said. ”So voting never stopped at these locations.”

Out of more than 27,000 voting machines used Tuesday, only four did not work properly.

“Your county election directors, 159 counties, they want to do their job right. They don’t look left. They don’t look right. They walk with integrity. They want to do the process with integrity,” Raffensperger said.

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Raffensperger told Gray that county election elections were told to prepare for an Election Day turnout of 1 million voters. That’s roughly what Georgia saw on Nov. 3.

Anecdotally, election officials said it looks like turnout is lighter than the general election, but they won’t know that for sure until they start counting ballots when the polls close.

Over 3 million Georgians already cast an early ballot or absentee ballot.

Raffensperger said Georgians should not expect a result tonight. If the vote is close, we likely won’t know who won the races until Wednesday.

“We’re going to see some numbers at the beginning that don’t necessarily look like the final numbers,” he said. “It depends which county has the first numbers that come in. So just encourage everyone to be patient.”