Georgia in the spotlight as vote count continues

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s top elections official plans a Wednesday morning news conference amid delays, confusion and technical glitches in the state’s still incomplete vote-counting.

The Associated Press has not declared a winner in Georgia’s presidential contest because the race between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden is too early to call, with outstanding ballots left to be counted in counties where Biden has performed well.

Trump and Biden are locked in a tight contest to secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Georgia offers 16 electoral votes.

In Gwinnett County, also one of Georgia’s largest, a software problem interfered with the way thousands of mailed absentee ballots are scanned in batches, county officials said.

Some of those ballots will now go through a process known as adjudication, where a 3-person panel that includes representatives of both major parties try to determine the voter’s intent, county spokesman Joe Sorenson said in an email early Wednesday.

In the metro Atlanta county of DeKalb — one of the state’s largest — officials will resume processing absentee ballots at 11 a.m. Wednesday, the county said in a statement released after midnight.

Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, also stopped counting, but resumed the process at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt said. She said earlier that the county plans to resume tallying absentee ballots over the next two days.

Inside State Farm Arena, the home of the Atlanta Hawks NBA team, about 50 people were counting Fulton County votes in a well-lit conference room on Wednesday.

In Cobb County, also in metro Atlanta, approximately 15,000 absentee ballots remain to be processed on Wednesday or Thursday, Cobb County Elections Director Janine Eveler said Wednesday morning. Then, on Friday, the county plans to process another 882 provisional ballots along with any military and overseas ballots and any ballots with missing or mismatched signatures that have been corrected.

Fulton’s decision to stop counting late on Election Night frustrated Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

“Fulton County just decided to lay up for the day. What am I supposed to do about that? It’s really frustrating,” Raffensperger told WSB-TV.

Raffensperger plans a briefing on Georgia’s vote-counting efforts at 11:30 a.m. at the State Capitol.

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