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Union County elections board: recount and statewide audits find no material discrepancies
Summary
The Board reviewed a state-required recount of a May Public Service Commission race and statewide audits of the May primary; local recounts and risk-limiting audits found near-perfect alignment with machine counts and a statewide ballot-image audit detected 23 discrepancies across 1,111,856 ballots.
The Union County Board of Elections reported on July 13 that a state-required recount of the May Public Service Commission (PSC) race turned up no discrepancies and that statewide audit results showed near-identical outcomes to machine counts.
Elections Superintendent Elizabeth Stevens told the Board a complete recount of the May PSC race was required under state recount rules because the final margin met the threshold for an automatic recount; Union County’s recount found no discrepancies. Stevens also summarized the statewide risk-limiting audit of the May Republican U.S. Senate primary: the original machine counts for the two top challengers were Collins 55,140 votes and Dooley 43,281 votes; the audit hand-count for sampled batches gave Collins 55,141 and Dooley 43,284, a 99.99% alignment with the machine totals.
Stevens reported the statewide ballot-image audit tallied printed ballot text across 1,111,856 ballots and found 23 discrepancies overall, corresponding to a reported accuracy rate of 99.9979% for the audited images. According to the Board’s briefing, all 23 discrepancies occurred on ballots marked by hand; machine-marked ballots in the audited sample showed no discrepancies while hand-marked ballots showed a 99.93% accuracy rate.
The Board’s materials included a statement quoted from the Secretary of State: “We will continue to conduct audits after every election,” Raffensperger said, “We run elections with nearly perfect accuracy, and we will never stop reminding the public their machines are accurate, their counts are accurate, and that elections in Georgia are accurate.”
The Board did not report any local corrective action arising from the recount or audits. The discussion was presented as informational to document the county’s participation in state audit processes and the local recount outcome.
