Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffesnsperger makes ‘health check’ on Lee County voting machines

LEESBURG — Making his 60th stop in a statewide tour on Thursday in Lee County, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger gave high marks to the smoothness of elections in one of the first counties to report results each election.

The secretary of state’s office is conducting checks throughout the state ahead of municipal elections that will be held on Nov. 7 and the 2024 elections that start with the presidential preference primary to kick off a presidential election year.

Lee County will be one of the first to use a new software system that will be installed and used for the Leesburg City Council race on the ballot.

“We’re going to all 159 counties,” Raffensperger said. “This is county 60. Our goal is to be done by Christmas, so we’ll be good.

“This fall we have five or six counties that will be implementing the new software system. We’re just excited about doing this.”

The implementation of the upgrade will be a top-to-bottom replacement of the software currently in use with the Dominion voting machines, Raffensperger said.

There are about 30,000 voting stations used in elections statewide. The state is using a small number of counties as a testing measure to gain federal approval for the implementation of the new software.

Like all of the state’s counties, Lee County did a hand audit of ballots for the 2020 presidential race, the secretary of state said, and those results verified the tallies of the machines.

“If you go back to 2020, after the initial count was done, there was a 100% hand count done and it was exactly the same,” Raffensperger said. “Twenty-eight thousand skipped the race, the presidential race, and voted in races down the ballot.”

Comparing counties throughout the state, Republican representatives and senatorial candidates received about 5% more votes.

“Collectively it was more than 33,000 votes,” the secretary of state said.

The resulting investigation showed that out of some 5 million votes, one deceased person and one underage person and less than 74 felons cast ballots.

“We investigated,” he said. “The GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) investigated. The FBI investigated. President Trump had a hand-picked team.

“We understand when you have a statewide race in Georgia it will be very close. We want people to have 100% confidence in this, and this is why we’re doing all 159 counties, (so people know) this is secure and this is accurate.”

The state initiated some election reforms following the 2020 election, including requiring identification even for absentee voting, with security features that help ensure voting is secure, Raffensperger said.

“Texas has copied our law,” he said. “We do have the cleanest voter roles in the whole country, and we’re recognized by the Heritage Foundation for election security.”

For the 2022 election, about 65% of voters who cast ballots did so during the early voting period, 30% on election day and about 5% voted absentee.

Staff Photo: Alan MauldinAlanMauldin[email protected]
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