‘It’s a lot quicker.’ Macon counting votes for presidential election... again

The Macon-Bibb County Board of Elections started performing another recount of the presidential election Tuesday, but the Houston County Board of Elections opted to wait until Saturday to start counting votes again.

After adding a by-hand recount of the presidential election to Georgia’s auditing process, President Donald Trump submitted a formal request for another recount, but this recount is being done electronically.

The Bibb Board of Elections started counting around 2 p.m. Tuesday after an orientation to explain to the poll workers and observers the process, said Mike Kaplan, chair of the Bibb Board of Elections.

A normal recount would involve plugging in the memory cards from early voting and Election Day and re-scanning absentee ballots; however, Kaplan said they are re-scanning every ballot for this recount.

“It’s a lot quicker than the hand recount,” Kaplan said.

Batches of 50 ballots will be scanned starting with about 20,000 absentee ballots and moving to early voting ballots and Election Day ballots, similar to the process of the by-hand recount, Kaplan said.

Kaplan also expects there will be fewer absentee ballots that have to be adjudicated because the computers have been programmed to only look at the presidential race. This means ballots won’t be set aside if they have issues on down-ballot races.

Houston County decided to wait until Saturday at 9 a.m. to start recounting the ballots, said Andy Holland, the election registration assistant supervisor.

“We decided to wait because we needed time to get some staff together, and we are working on getting these absentee ballots out for the runoff,” Holland said.

The county has already received several applications for absentee ballots for the runoff election in January, Holland said, so they wanted to focus on processing them before starting on the recount, he said.

The electronic recount shouldn’t take as long as the by-hand recount, and Holland estimated Houston County should be done in around three days.

“It does pull some people and resources away from preparing for the runoff, but it’s something that we kind of planned out, and we’re trying to do it with as little impact as possible,” he said.

Kaplan said Bibb County election workers plan to resume counting on today to make the Wednesday at midnight deadline.

People are registering to vote, and Kaplan said they are already sending out absentee ballots. However, he said the recount can’t delay preparations for the runoff election because early voting starts Dec. 14.

“We’re already into the next election, which is the runoff, and this is taking up time of our staff, but we have enough staff we think that we can get both done at the same time,” he said.