ATLANTA — Floyd County fired its embattled election chief on Thursday, three days after a hand recount of the presidential race in Georgia’s closely watched election audit turned up 2,600 previously uncounted votes.
The secretary of state’s office initially asked Robert Brady to resign, which he did not do.
Floyd County’s Board of Elections met Thursday afternoon and voted to terminate him. Officials cited at least two reprimands he had received in the past six months.
The initial error occurred because county election officials under Brady’s watch had failed to upload votes from a memory card in a ballot scanning machine, Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the new election system for the secretary of state’s office, said Monday night.
“The reason you do an audit is to find this kind of thing,” he said.
The Rome City Commissioner Wendy Davis told Fox 5 that Brady’s firing was a foregone conclusion.
“It really is a matter of human error, not of some big fraud or conspiracy, and people make mistakes, but unfortunately, I think this one falls at the feet of our elections director, who I’ve been critical of this entire elections cycle,” she said.
President Trump could see a gain of about 800 net votes from the newly discovered ballots in Floyd County.
The secretary of state’s office is expected to release the results of a hand count Thursday.
About 5 million Georgians voted in the presidential election.
Going into the hand recount, Trump trailed Joe Biden by about 14,000 votes.
