ATLANTA — Georgia's 159 counties on Wednesday completed their hand counts of many votes as a risk-limiting audit on the state's 2024 election results.
Risk-limiting audits are performed after ever general election in Georgia as a matter of state law. Election workers hand-count the results of randomly assigned batches of ballots as a check against machine-counted results.
For breaking live coverage and news conferences you can download 11Alive+, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.
The idea is to see if the hand-counted result falls within an acceptable range of the machine-counted result to verify the machine-counted result.
The audit is performed on one race, and it is up to the Georgia secretary of state to choose the race -- in 2020, Sec. Brad Raffensperger chose to audit the presidential race because of the contentious nature of that election. The presidential race was again chosen in 2024.
It is conducted before the deadline for Raffensperger to certify the state's election results so the electors of the winning candidate can gather to finalize their slate and submit it to the Electoral College. That deadline for Raffensperger this year is Nov. 22, this Friday.
Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the Georgia Secretary of State's Office, reported Wednesday that the all 159 counties in the Peach State had completed their portions of the audit.
"It’s hard work and they hand tallied over 700,000 ballots overall. Great job by our counties. Thank you to them and their workers," Sterling wrote.
It hasn't yet been announced when state officials will publish the results of the audit. You can see the results of the 2020 presidential election audit here.