ATLANTA — A second election official in Georgia has been fired for “negligent failure to follow protocol” that resulted in several dozen ballots being omitted from DeKalb County’s original vote count, officials said Friday.
The DeKalb County elections board recertified its results for the second time in as many days Friday morning, adding 59 absentee ballots that were previously omitted.
A similar vote on Thursday afternoon added 36 previously omitted absentees in the razor-thin race between President Trump and President-elect Joe Biden.
The DeKalb County official has not been identified, and a breakdown was not immediately available of whom the votes were for.
DeKalb County Elections Board Chairman Sam Tillman said the employee “failed to follow our established protocol and blatantly disregarded the required processes we utilize to account for and record all legal and verified ballots.”
Tillman said an internal review found that the employee “is the same person that made the human error in failing to follow protocols, which caused our previous recertification.”
He continued, “Since the employee’s departure, management’s corrective actions and reviews ultimately yielded 59 additional ballots that were omitted from our count.”
The firing comes a day after Floyd County officials fired its election chief after an audit found 2,600 previously uncounted votes.
The secretary of state’s office had initially asked Robert Brady to resign, which he did not do.
The Floyd County 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 failed to upload votes from a memory card in a ballot-scanning machine, said Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the new election system for the secretary of state’s office.
“The reason you do an audit is to find this kind of thing,” he said.
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.
