'Human error' blamed as investigators confirm mistakes in counting of Georgia election votes: report

Vote counters in Fulton County made numerous mistakes during an audit of Georgia's 2020 election results – though the findings were not enough change the outcome of the election, according to a report.

State election investigators blamed "human error" for the mistakes, which included double-counted and misallocated votes, but the audit supported two machine counts that found President Joe Biden had won the state's election by about 12,000 votes, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“The reported inconsistencies were the result of human error in entering the data, which were not discovered in time to make corrections due to time limitations in completing the risk-limiting audit and the sheer amount of ballots, and not due to intentional misconduct,” reads a consent order recently approved by the State Election Board and the county. “The discovered errors were a fractional number of the total votes counted and did not affect the result of the 2020 general election.”

The consent order and investigative files were obtained through an open records request, and a rough estimate by the newspaper indicates the audit counted about 3,000 too many absentee votes for Biden, but that total was not used as Georgia's certified vote count, and despite the audit's inaccuracies in ballot batches the overall count was close to the official machine results.

"The State Election Board ordered Fulton County to 'cease and desist' from violations in future audits, implement new audit procedures and adequately train elections staff," the Journal-Constitution reported. "The board approved the consent order June 21, during the same meetings in which it scuttled a potential takeover of the county’s elections and dismissed allegations of fraud on election night at State Farm Arena."

The audit found 345 additional net votes for Trump in the county, a Democratic stronghold where Biden won 73 percent of the total vote – or 243,000 more votes than the former president – and the survey was designed to statistically confirm with a high degree of confidence the machine ballot count had correctly determined the winner.

“It’s not surprising that some mistakes were made in the process of counting more than 5 million ballots, and it’s important to analyze those mistakes, just like the secretary of state’s office did, to ensure that audit practices always improve over time,” said Ben Adida, executive director for VotingWorks, which designed the auditing software. “At the same time, the uncovered errors don’t change the outcome or effectiveness of the audit: The winner of the election in Georgia in 2020 was Joe Biden.”

The software was slow to update data, so elections staff re-entered numbers when they weren't sure whether the system had accepted results, which sometimes caused duplicate entries, and the six-day audit left little time for staffers to check and correct errors, according to a letter from the county.

“The RLA (risk-limiting audit) was the first of its kind in Georgia," a county attorney wrote to the secretary of state’s office. "The counties were not properly assisted in preparing for the RLA and were not given tools and resources to allow them to reconcile the data that was entered. A more robust system capable of handling the data and additional time would eliminate the issues.”