Georgia launches election audit with roll of dice for secretary of state race

ATLANTA — Georgia election officers hosted a cube roll on the state Capitol on Wednesday to launch an audit of votes within the latest election for secretary of state.

The video featured is from a associated story.

One after the other, individuals chosen randomly from a basket of names got here as much as a desk and rolled a 10-sided die. In all, 20 cube have been rolled, producing a quantity that was fed into a pc to find out the batches of votes counties should depend as a part of the audit.

The audit stems from a regulation handed in 2019, not from any considerations about issues or the integrity of the state’s election outcomes. An audit is required for normal elections in even-numbered years on a race chosen by the secretary of state. It should be accomplished earlier than the election outcomes are licensed.

Georgia 2022 Senate race heading to runoff election between Warnock, Walker

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger introduced final week that he was selecting his race for the audit. Raffensperger, a Republican, beat Democratic state Home Rep. Bee Nguyen.

Officers say the aim of the audit is to confirm that the result of the secretary of state’s race was appropriate and extra broadly, to spice up confidence in elections.

Former President Donald Trump focused Raffensperger after the 2020 normal election for failing to overturn his slim loss in Georgia. In a now-notorious January 2021 telephone name, Trump prompt Raffensperger may “discover” sufficient votes to reverse Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Trump falsely blamed voter fraud for his loss in different states as nicely. State officers and federal investigators, together with Trump’s personal legal professional normal, have stated there was no proof of widespread fraud within the 2020 contest.

Raffensperger defeated a Trump-endorsed main challenger on this yr’s election contest.

As a part of the audit, each county within the state should test the outcomes recorded by vote-tallying scanners in opposition to a hand-count of ballots on the batches of votes chosen.

Gabe Sterling, a high official within the secretary of state’s workplace, stated the cube roll was a part of an effort to make the method of selecting vote batches as random as potential.

ALSO SEE: Election outcomes 2022: Key takeaways and race outcomes to this point; Home, Senate management unclear

“We cannot know upfront, so the counties cannot go, ‘I will be sure this batch is ideal and all the opposite ones are crap,’” he stated.

The counties should start the audit on Thursday. The secretary of state’s workplace is asking them to finish it by the subsequent day.

The audit ends both when election officers attain a sure degree of confidence that the result is appropriate or a full depend has been carried out.

State regulation requires 90% certainty that the result is appropriate, however Raffensperger stated final week he’s growing that to 95%, that’s to say a “danger restrict” of 5%.