Report: Georgia Election Monitor Finds 9,626-Vote Error in County’s Hand Recount

LAWRENCEVILLE, GA - NOVEMBER 16: Gwinnett County election workers handle ballots as part o
Megan Varner/Getty Images
Hannah Knudsen

A monitor has reportedly discovered a 9,626-vote error in Georgia’s DeKalb County’s hand recount, according to Georgia Republican Party chairman David Shafer.

“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,” Shafer said. “The actual count for the batch was 1,081 for Biden and 13 for Trump.”

According to Shafer, the error, if not discovered, would have essentially given 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 be signed off by two official counters,” Shafer continued in the Wednesday update.

The Georgia GOP chairman 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 pushed back on criticism from the Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, who stated that Shafer’s report was “grossly misleading.”

“Dave is wrong here. We have no idea whether either the first or second hand count matches the original machine count because audit has not been completed,” he said after Wasserman asserted that the discovery does not impact Georgia’s overall vote margin:

The news follows reports of thousands of uncounted ballots in other Georgia counties. On Monday, the Georgia secretary of state’s office announced that Floyd County discovered roughly 2,600 uncounted ballots.

According to officials, President Trump benefitted the most from the discovery, with 1,643 votes, followed by 865 additional votes for Joe Biden (D) and 16 for libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen. The finding resulted in a net gain of about 800 for the president:

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 former Vice President Joe Biden,” as Breitbart News reported:

Trump also netted 176 votes following an audit in Walton County.

Shafer and Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), who is leading the Trump campaign’s recount effort in Georgia, sent a letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) last week expressing concern over the state’s audit, recount, and recanvass and contending that the “stated goals … do not satisfy our concerns that gave rise to our request for a hand count in the first place.”

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