New Georgia Audit Reveals Every Ballot Error Came from Hand-Marked Ballots

Atlanta - Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the results of the ballot image audit that not only confirmed the results of the June 16 runoff but demonstrated the inherent risk in relying on hand-marked ballots for secure elections.

“Human beings make human errors,” said Raffensperger, “and the likelihood of a discrepancy between voter intent and what’s marked on a ballot is greatest when that ballot has been marked by hand.”

This additional audit, separate from the Risk Limiting Audit announced earlier, confirmed the outcomes of all 91 contests sent to runoffs after the results of the May 19 General Primary.  

For the ballot image audit, all 1,111,856 ballot images were audited, and 23 discrepancies were detected, demonstrating an overall accuracy rate of 99.9979%.

Detailed analysis of the data shows that the 23 discrepancies all occurred in ballots that hand been marked by hand, while none of the 1,079,408 ballots utilizing a ballot-marking device showed discrepancies.

The machine-marked ballots were 100% accurate, while the hand-marked ballots were 99.93% accurate.  

That same error rate, applied during a Presidential election year with an expected 5 million ballots cast, would create some 3,500 discrepancies.  

“We will continue to conduct audits after every election,” said Raffensperger. “We run elections with nearly perfect accuracy, and we will never stop reminding the public their machines are accurate, their counts are accurate, and that elections in Georgia are accurate.”

Full audit results can be found here.

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Georgia is recognized as a national leader in elections. It was the first state in the country to implement the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 17 days of early voting (which has been called the “gold standard”), and no-excuse absentee voting. Georgia continues to set records for voter turnout and election participation, seeing the largest increase in average turnout of any other state in the 2018 midterm election and record turnout in 2020, and 2022. 2022 achieved the largest single day of in-person early voting turnout in Georgia midterm history utilizing Georgia’s secure, paper ballot voting system. Most recently, Georgia ranked #2 for Election Integrity by the Heritage Foundation, a top ranking for Voter Accessibility by the Center for Election Innovation & Research and tied for number one in Election Administration by the Bipartisan Policy Center.