A monitor in the Georgia hand recount and audit discovered a 9,626 vote error in DeKalb County, according to the state’s Republican Party chairman.
Chairman David Shafer said, “One of our monitors discovered a 9,626 vote error in the DeKalb County hand count. One batch was labeled 10,707 for Biden and 13 for Trump — an improbable margin even by DeKalb standards. The actual count for the batch was 1,081 for Biden and 13 for Trump.”
If it had not been discovered, Shafer said, the error would have given Joe Biden enough votes to “cancel out Trump’s gains from Fayette, Floyd and Walton.”
“We were limited to 1 monitor for every 10 counting tables and we were kept some distance from the tables. There is no telling what we missed under these unreasonable restrictions. The miscounted batch had been been signed off by two official counters,” the GOP chairman added in a Wednesday update.
He added that an affidavit from the monitor has been turned over to the secretary of state, and their attorneys have “requested an investigation.”
Shafer also countered the accusation from Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report, who accused him of making a “grossly misleading” report.
“Dave is wrong here. We have no idea whether either the first or second hand count matches the original machine count because the audit has not been completed,” Shafer said after Wasserman asserted that the discovery does not impact Georgia’s overall vote margin.
The news comes amid reports of thousands of uncounted ballots in Georgia counties.
On Monday, for example, the recount found 2,600 uncounted ballots, which, after they had been tallied, gave a net 800 vote boost to President Trump. According to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffenspberger, the problem lay with the Floyd County election officials who failed to upload votes from a memory card in a ballot-scanning machine.
Then on Tuesday, the Georgia secretary of state’s office announced that over 2,700 votes in Fayette County were not uploaded properly. Of the 2,755 votes, 1,577 were for President Trump, while 1,128 went to the former vice president.
Trump also netted 176 votes following an audit in Walton County.
The handling of the election by Secretary of State Raffenspberger, a Republican, has prompted deep criticism from fellow members of his party.
Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) again called for Rafenspberger to resign on Wednesday after having previously done so in a joint statement with Senator David Perdue (R-Ga.). Both of their elections will be decided by an upcoming runoff race, the result of which has the potential to shift control of the Senate.
“We have to make sure that every legal vote is counted, and I also believe that we also have to hold officials accountable. Look, I came out of the private sector. People held me accountable as an executive,” Loeffler told “America’s Newsroom.”
When host Sandra Smith asked Loeffler whether she was calling for the resignation of the Georgia secretary of state, Loeffler replied, “Yes, I am.”
Raffenspberger has been defiant against Republican charges that he has mishandled the election. For example, he claimed the president sabotaged himself in Georgia by having “suppressed” the Republican vote in the state.
“Twenty-four thousand people did not vote in the fall; either they did not vote absentee because they were told by the president ‘don’t vote absentee, it’s not secure,” the secretary of state said in an interview. “But then they did not come out and vote in person. He would have won by 10,000 votes. He actually depressed, suppressed his own voting base.”
He also accused Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) of asking him to throw away legal votes in order to help President Trump win the election.
“I want to be clear, you say Senator Graham wanted you to find ways to get rid of legally cast ballots,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said to Raffenspberger, to which he replied “Well, just an implication that ‘look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.’”
So far, the vote recount continues to show Biden in the lead.
