Georgia investigation finds errors in Fulton audit of 2020 election

Vote counters made numerous mistakes during an audit of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election in Fulton County, including double-counted and misallocated votes, according to a consent order recently approved by the State Election Board and the county.

The finding doesn’t change the outcome of the audit, which showed that Democrat Joe Biden defeated Republican Donald Trump in Georgia. The audit supported two machine counts that found Biden won by about 12,000 votes.

State election investigators blamed “human error” for mistakes in a system that relied on sorting paper ballots by candidate, counting them by hand, writing totals on sheets of paper and then transcribing numbers into computers, according to the consent order and investigative files obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through the Georgia Open Records Act.

Double-counting likely occurred when election workers couldn’t tell whether auditing software had recorded their initial tally, leading them to enter numbers a second time. In several cases, they mistyped vote totals or allocated votes to the wrong candidate.

A rough estimate by the AJC indicates the errors identified by investigators amounted to about 3,000 too many absentee votes counted for Biden during the audit, which was not used as Georgia’s certified vote count. Despite inaccuracies in the ballot batches that were investigated, the overall count in the audit was close to the official machine results.

The State Election Board ordered Fulton County to “cease and desist” from violations in future audits and implement new audit procedures. 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 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,” the consent order states.