ATLANTA — A second Georgia county has uncovered 2,755 votes not previously counted in the state’s presidential race, narrowing Joe Biden’s lead over President Trump to under 13,000.
Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system manager, said Fayette County election workers didn’t initially upload votes stored on a memory card.
“They didn’t do the reconciliation process properly,” he said.
The breakdown of the uncounted ballots was 1,577 for Trump, 1,128 for Biden, 43 for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen, and seven write-in votes, Sterling said.
Tuesday’s incident marks the second time a big batch of votes were uncounted in the state’s original tally.
On Monday, election officials said they found 2,600 uncounted ballots in Floyd County.
“The reason you do an audit is to find this kind of thing,” Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the new election system for the secretary of state’s office, said Monday night.
In that incident, the error occurred because county election officials failed to upload votes from a memory card in a ballot scanning machine, Sterling said, adding that he believed Floyd County’s elections director should resign.
Both counties will have to recertify their results, and the margin between Trump and Biden currently sits around 13,000.
The news comes on the heels of an announcement by embattled Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who said a random audit of a sample of Georgia’s new voting machines found no evidence of hacking or tampering.
The audit was done on a random sample from voting machines in Cobb, Douglas, Morgan, Paulding, Spalding, and Floyd counties.
Election officials in the state’s 159 counties have until 11:59 p.m. Wednesday to finish the recount. The results will be certified on Friday.
