Nonpartisan election transparency advocates aim to build voter confidence by ensuring errors similar to the missing memory card in the midterms in Cobb County are quickly detected and counties are alerted

ATLANTA, GA – While election workers in each of Georgia’s 159 counties process election results for Dec 6th’s Senate runoff election, two nonpartisan groups focused on fair and transparent elections will be checking the numbers for apparent anomalies in real time. Recent discoveries of precincts whose votes weren’t all counted, such as in Cobb County in the November 8 election and in DeKalb County in the May 24 primary, have brought attention to the need for additional real-time checks on the voting system pre-certification reporting.

Scrutineers.org and Coalition for Good Governance are teaming up for this project, which they say will reveal very quickly whether significant numbers of votes from any precincts have failed to upload properly, have been double-counted, or show irregularities.

“We know that county election workers are doing their best under very difficult conditions,” says Scrutineers Executive Director Emily Levy. “Unfortunately, the computers aggregating votes from the precincts don’t always alert the operator if an inserted memory card cannot be read. It’s also easy to overlook missing precinct memory cards in the rush of election night.”

“A thorough election audit would include auditing election processes,” says Coalition Executive Director Marilyn Marks. “Until the State of Georgia mandates routine process audits and basic ballot accounting, the public simply must step up to oversee and protect our elections.”

The groups will review publicly available data in real time as results iterations are reported by the counties and quickly analyze precinct-level results from throughout the state, using automated tools developed by Scrutineers. The iterative records preserved will help debunk any false claims by those who would disrupt the election with sensational assertions about flipped or manipulated votes.