An expansive spectator section. Laminated signs with bold letters. Nearly a dozen police cruisers.
The Chatham County Board of Elections has gone all out to ensure accuracy and transparency in response to the raucous 2020 election.
More than an hour after polls closed in Georgia at 7 p.m., Chatham County poll workers nearly finished counting the majority of collected early votes and absentee mailed ballots. Officials estimated around 90,000 advance votes were in their possession. In comparison, there were 133,420 total ballots cast in the U.S. Presidential election in 2020.
On Tuesday night, poll workers waited for the intermittent delivery of ballot containers of Election Day voters from Chatham’s 87 precincts. The containers are delivered by Chatham County Sheriff’s deputies.
The mood in the large facility where ballots where Georgia’s fifth-largest county are counted on Eisenhower Drive was quiet anticipation.
Lawyers for both the Democratic and Republican parties, poll watchers, and independent observers were in attendance, but, unlike recent years, few election skeptics were present to watch the count.
County election officials were prepared for any eventuality. They organized enhanced security and clearly demarcated the counting process. Eight police officers, including Chatham County Police Chief Jeff Hadley, lounged in the back of the facility.
In a bright green shirt, Elections Supervisor Billy Wooten whisked around the facility — advising election workers, chatting with police officers, informing updates to the media and ferrying poll watchers through the counting.
Laminated signs posted throughout the fluorescently bright room laid out the legal counting process. Individual informational sheets were available to anyone walking in as well.
According to the literature, the counting starts with the arrival and securing of ballots on Tuesday. It then moves to poll workers opening and reviewing ballots for any issues. Ballots with issues are duplicated and reviewed by workers, while all other ballots are scanned and voter choices are captured by the scanner.
Any scanner-identified issues are reviewed by workers manually, and scanned ballots are uploaded to the Secretary of State’s online reporting system. Those will be reported on the state’s election website. The physical ballots are then stored in a secure container until the post-election audit is completed.
‘More smoothly’
Just before 10 p.m., the head of the county election board expressed relief on the smooth processs.
“Elections in Chatham County are running more smoothly than they did in 2020,” according to Board Chairman Thomas Mahoney.
The day witnessed relatively few technical glitches. One incident occurred at a Liberty City polling station, where four voting machines cut out due to an electrical problem, according to local elections officials. It was quickly resolved.
Due to early coordination between election officials and the county police, law enforcement officers staffed polling places in case of any emergency.
Wooten said no major incidents occurred at any polling places across the county on Tuesday. There were, however, two cases where police asked people to leave for “mouthing” off and disobeying rules at polling places, Wooten said.
Throughout the day both parties had lawyers on standby to investigate allegations of voter fraud or intimidation.
Checking results
As of 8:55 p.m., there were 17 ballots that needed to be “adjudicated,” which means a team of poll workers must interpret the intended vote and why the scanner flagged a mistake.
Ballots from military service members will trickle in the rest of the week and be counted as they arrive.
Chatham County is legally required to submit all of its results by 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday. The Board of Elections has a meeting scheduled for noon, Tuesday, Nov. 12, to certify the results of the election.
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