Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is losing patience with the state’s most populous county as the deadline for the 2020 presidential recount nears.
Raffensperger on Tuesday claimed that Fulton County has been plagued by unforced errors that could put the state’s closely watched recount in jeopardy.
He added that the rest of the state was “getting a little tired of having to always wait on Fulton County and having to put up with their dysfunction.”
Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, reported problems over the weekend when one of the newly purchased Dominion Voting Systems servers crashed at the Georgia World Congress Center.
Raffensperger criticized Fulton election officials for putting out “a statement that only told part of the story.”
“It’s somewhat typical of what we’re seeing from Fulton County both recently and really for the last 15 to 25 years,” Raffensperger said. “The real issue is that a Fulton County employee made several compounding errors. The biggest was that instead of following the procedures that my office laid out … Fulton County once again cut corners, the biggest one being he backed up the election project on the server itself instead of on an external backup. Because of that decision, they lost the ability to upload hundreds of thousands of scanned ballots.”
Raffensperger also questioned Fulton County’s time management.
“Fulton County knocked off work at 4:45 p.m. on Sunday and 5 p.m. yesterday, announced they will scan from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. today,” he said around 9:30 a.m. “As of an hour ago, Fulton County had 8 of the 17 high-speed scanners going because of staffing shortages.”
Raffensperger said he’s hopeful the state can make its midnight Wednesday deadline but said Fulton seemed “to want to make it a dramatic finish” and that the secretary of state’s office had grown tired of the shenanigans.
Georgia’s presidential recount entered its final two days on Tuesday. The state is undergoing its third tally of votes, following the initial count and a hand recount that led to President-elect Joe Biden being certified as the winner.
President Trump requested the recount, as he is entitled to do under state law, because Biden’s margin of victory was less than 0.5 percentage points.
Raffensperger said nearly 50 of Georgia’s 159 counties had finished their work by Tuesday morning.
The Washington Examiner has reached out to Fulton County election officials for comment.
