The elections board of Floyd County, Georgia, on Thursday voted to terminate its executive director after an audit found ballots left uncounted prior to the county’s initial certification.
FOX 5 reports:
The board met for little more than an hour Thursday afternoon in a special meeting, which resulted in [Floyd Chief of Elections Clerk Robert Brady’s] termination. Officials cited at least two reprimands that Brady received in the past six months as the reason for his firing. […] Election officials discovered around 2,600 votes that were not counted in the county’s total earlier this week during the statewide audit. Election workers ultimately had to recount more than 8,000 ballots to get to the bottom of the problem.
“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,” Rome City Commissioner Wendy Davis said in a statement.
Davis added: “There weren’t the right double and triple checks right before certification to realize we hadn’t counted as many numbers as the people that early voted.”
Brady’s firing comes after the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office requested that he step down from his position.
Georgia voting system manager Gabriel Sterling labeled the uncounted ballots as an “amazing blunder” and said the secretary of state’s office will look into the matter.
“They just didn’t scan these ballots, or the card was not put through properly,” said Sterling. “Obviously the secretary and our whole office is perturbed, to say the least, that this was allowed to happen in that county.” He described it as “too important of an issue to have allowed to happen this way” and said that, as such, the secretary of state would seek the resignation of Floyd County’s election director.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Tuesday an audit of the state’s voting machines found no evidence of tampering.
Raffensperger said in a statement announcing the completion of the audit that there was “no sign of foul play.”
He ordered Pro V&V, a U.S. Election Assistance Commission-certified testing laboratory, to conduct the audit on a random sample of Dominion Voting Systems machines statewide, which used forensic techniques and verification processes to confirm no tampering, cyberattacks or election hacking.
“Pro V&V found no evidence of the machines being tampered,” the secretary of state’s office said.
“We are glad but not surprised that the audit of the state’s voting machines was an unqualified success,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “Election security has been a top priority since day one of may administration. We have partnered with the Department of Homeland Security, the Georgia Cyber Center, Georgia Tech security experts, and wide range of other election security experts around the state and country so Georgia voters can be confident that their vote is safe and secure.”
The UPI contributed to this report.
