Fulton Will Rescan 1,069 Early Ballots After Polls Close. The First Scanner Broke 13 Days Ago

Fulton County, Georgia, will ask its elections board tonight to approve a special counting process for 1,069 early ballots that were cast on two scanners that broke during early voting. The first one broke on Oct. 21. The paperwork asking for the fix is dated today, Election Day.

It is all in a one-page memo from Fulton’s elections director, Nadine Williams, to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and two of his top election officials. “Due to equipment failures experienced with two (2) ICP scanners during Advanced Voting, the tabulation procedure for those scanners require modification,” she wrote. She said she will ask the county Board of Registration and Elections to “formally adopt the modified method of tabulation” at its 6:30 p.m. meeting, with the work starting “between 7:00-7:30 pm,” right after the polls close.

This is the same county where the FBI hauled off boxes of 2020 ballots in January. Now it wants to run more than a thousand ballots back through a machine on election night.

What broke, in the county’s own words

An ICP is the scanner at the polling place, the box voters feed their paper ballot into. Its memory cards hold the vote totals that get uploaded on election night. Fulton lost two of them.

Mechanicsville Library, Oct. 21, 361 ballots. “A wheelchair-bound voter accidentally rolled over a scanner’s power cable, causing an unexpected shutdown,” the memo says. “Upon restarting the scanner, an error displayed on the screen and the scanner would no longer operate.” Then the bigger problem: state voting systems staff “advised that the memory cards from that scanner should not be uploaded due to potential corruption of data.” So all 361 paper ballots will be fed through a central county scanner instead.

Hugh C. Conley Recreation Center, Oct. 26, 708 ballots. The scanner “persistently displayed a paper jam error, even after troubleshooting and confirming there was no apparent jam.” It was shut down. The plan here is to move its memory cards into another scanner tonight to finish the close-out. If that fails, the 708 paper ballots get rescanned too.

Think of it like a cash register that crashed halfway through a shift. The receipts are still in the drawer, but nobody trusts the register’s total anymore, so somebody has to ring every one of them up again. The whole question is whether every receipt gets rung up once, and only once.

Raffensperger’s version

Raffensperger brought it up himself at his 10 a.m. briefing, and he made it sound smaller than the memo does. “With Fulton, approximately 1,000 ballots from advance voting will be rescanned as the equipment was taken out of service as a precaution due to screen errors,” he said. “But this will not delay the results in any way at the end of the day.”

The memo does not describe a precaution. It describes one scanner that “would no longer operate” and memory cards the state itself said not to trust, plus a second scanner that kept reporting a jam that wasn’t there.

When a reporter asked whether he had concerns about how Fulton runs its elections, Raffensperger, who is leaving office after this election, defended the county. He said it has a new elections director since 2020, has made “tremendous strides” and runs a facility he is “just really impressed with.” Asked if this specific problem worried him, he said: “It’s one of those things that can happen.”

Why Fulton gets no benefit of the doubt

Fulton is not just any county. On Jan. 28, FBI agents executed a court-authorized search warrant at the county’s Election Hub and Operations Center and loaded boxes of 2020 ballots into trucks (AP). In a companion warrant application, the agent wrote that the records “would corroborate the analysis that evinces that election records were destroyed and or the tabulation of votes included materially false votes, either through duplicated scanning of specific ballots, interjection of pristine ballots, or other methods” (FBI affidavit). Those are the agent’s allegations, and no charges have been filed over them.

“Duplicated scanning” is exactly the risk in any rescan. So is the opposite, a ballot that never gets counted at all. Tonight’s job is to make sure 361 ballots, and maybe 708 more, each count one time.

It has not been a quiet day in Fulton, either. Late in the morning the county warned that “some Fulton County voters have reported receiving text messages regarding polling place changes. These text messages were not sent by Fulton County” (Fulton County on 𝕏). Gabriel Sterling of the secretary of state’s office said the texts did not come from the state either, and told voters to check the state’s My Voter Page.

Fulton says 1,069 ballots is a sliver of the more than 328,000 cast during advance voting in the county (Fulton County). That is about one ballot in 300. In a state where statewide races have been decided by fewer than 12,000 votes, slivers matter.

What still hasn’t been explained

The county has not said why a memo describing failures from Oct. 21 and Oct. 26 is dated Election Day, or when voters and the parties were first told. It has not said where the 361 Mechanicsville ballots and the 708 Conley ballots have been stored since their scanners went down, or how it will show that the paper count matches the number of voters who checked in at those two sites on those days.

Nor has anyone explained what exactly happened inside the Mechanicsville scanner that made the state warn its data might be corrupted, or why the Conley machine kept seeing a jam that wasn’t there.

What happens tonight

The board meets at 6:30 p.m., with a media briefing right after (Fulton County on 𝕏). If it signs off, Williams says an announcement will be made in the public observation area of the Election Hub in Fairburn, and “these actions will still occur within view of the public and a closer view of the process will be available for poll watchers and individuals permitted within the restricted area at the tabulation center.” The county says that “to promote transparency throughout the process, upon approval, the rescanning shall be conducted in public view” (Fulton County on 𝕏).

Good. Every Republican poll watcher in Georgia should want a seat in that room. Fulton promised transparency. Tonight it gets to prove it, one ballot at a time.