You see, i talk relatively quickly, so i will do my best. We continued to work through the weekend. Im going to go over the numbers right now. As we close in on counties beginning to the certification process, i know there were questions concerning military ballots which were the last to come in on friday. With that, at the end of the day, we are at 18,400 military and outstanding, which means they cannot come in now, but these were out there available. They could have come in but did not, 7786. Separate from that was the regular absentee ballots. With that, the ballots cast were 1,303,749 absentee ballots. There are 126,400 that were not cast. You will see that as a lower number than the original full request because we had hundreds of thousands of people show up to vote in person who had their which is ats process that is legal in georgia. We have seen 700,000 provisional to have come from the counties. We know 7300 provisionals have been excepted already and we are continuing to work with counties befind out how many might reported, but they are working on final reports. 47 counties have given us their certified results. I do not have a list right here. You can go to our website to look for those counties. On the map they will be colored orange. Items that a few happened as we watched over the weekend that for lack of a better word or different terminologies, fake news, misinformation, misunderstandings, all of those things feeding into the situation, not just in georgia, but across the country. I may go into the weeds on some of these. I think they need to be fully understood as we see people who are genuinely upset with the outcome for genuinely thrilled with the outcome. The facts are the facts. Regardless of outcomes. That is one of the things we are focused on, getting our count accurate and right, getting Accurate Information so at the end of the day everybody understands that in georgia, we have actual accurate outcome. First, as you know, there was an early report of a quote unquote glitch or Software Issue or problem in michigan. Re was no softwareish an Software Issue in michigan. This is going to get very much into the weeds and i apologize for that. It did not affect the outcomes. We have a small county in michigan with a clerk who happened to be a republican, they had 17 scanners, i believe. Scanner, she got the School Board Race she called her source and said, i need you to come here and add to this particular race, factor this so that people can vote on it. They reprinted ballots because they have hand marked paper ballots for that particular precinct. The election source said heres your new database. Remember, you have a new universal database for your county, meaning you have to burn new media not just for the one precinct, but all precincts. Ok . What happened was she just did the one precinct. In doing so, the tabulators themselves, the scanners saw the some so they got the results. The situation came up because she has 17 scanners and one database. The database she has, only the new scanner is aligned with the database. The other 16 are not. If anyone works with an xl excel spreadsheet and you put in formulas and the formulas all work and then you add a column, the formulas all go to crap. It makes no sense. The database could not recognize what it was looking at. Obviously they had people getting zero results. When they were looking at it on their Election Night reporting system, because of the way it was happening, they recognized it very quickly. They took the numbers down. The tabulators, the scanners did everything right. It was a simple reporting issue because of an error because she forgot to change her media out. Thats not a glitch, not a Software Issue. That is a human being who made a mistake under trying circumstances. The county has 44,000 people and it is not well resourced. There is no Software Issue. Some people saw some very entertaining video of some people dumpster diving in Spalding County and looking for quote unquote ballots. There were no ballots. What they found were empty security envelopes. There was nothing there that affected the outcome of the election. There was nothing there on that front. The issue with the gwinnett ballots cast being almost twice as much as what was shown as the overall vote, the issue is many of you from georgia understand that under the National Voting rights act, we know county is the Gwinnett County is the one county in georgia that has to use two languages, spanish and english. In doing so, essentially there are double the number of pages on their ballots. Common sense made us realize that in the reporting, it is not ballots cast, it is pages scanned. We already talked to dominion about the fact the language needs to be changed. The fact that its not exactly double is because sometimes people just turn in the front page. Just the one about president , thats it and they dont care about the rest of it and they leave it behind. There are no double ballot votes cast in gwinnett. The count going slowly, what is the issue . Their results were all uploaded tuesday night. They had a situation where they tried to make something work better and ordered an additional adjudication module. In this particular case, the adjudication module was not being used to figure out to discern a persons vote, it was being used to get the right ends off of the dmv ballots. Because there is no way to get off the scanner. You have to go to the adjudication module because in a president ial race we have certified writein vote candidates, so you have to have those folks for your final counts. The issue they have, truly a configuration issue, not a not a software glitch, it was a configuration issue where they had a single adjudication server and that server was going to multiple workstations. Now to send out the ballot images on that, they have to use something called microsoft q. Or ms q. Configuration was done incorrectly. Dominion said they messed up, our fault. That is what held them up. That slowed down the server. The secondary part is because they had so much more data on the ballots because they had more information on them, there is a lot more whitespace on the standard ballot because they dont have much printing on. It requires much more memory. It slowed everything down. An engineer came from denver to optimize their server. Everything went through on sunday really well. They have now updated. Issue wereg poll someone supposedly called or showed up, or it was a man or a woman or a person named crystal, because the story kept on moving , essentially, these are the facts we know. According to the log files, padsng touched the poll after october 31. That was the last update. There was nothing that was done to the system after that date. The night before, nothing was happening to the system. Saturday night, which was so much fun after the georgia game, i got to drive to state farm arena because Fulton County found an issue. We did not know what it was but we made sure immediately we had our monitor on site. Carter jones was there. We had an investigator on site immediately. The secretary dispatched to the scene as well. Again, anybody who has grown up in this state, in this area, knows their system. Fulton being fulton, we know National Media and the campaigns were wondering whats going on so we wanted to have boots on the ground to keep an eye on the situation. What happened there was again, bad process. They uploaded results on friday. They then did the reconciliation after. In general, when you are about to tell the world these are the numbers, when everybody around the world and the countries look the country is look at them, you probably want to do reconciliation prior to uploading them. They did not. And unfortunately, the gamble did not pay off. They figured out hours later at that the reconciliation did not match. Something to the tune of, and forgive my math, i think it was 484 total votes that they were off, and it was all inside the provisional bucket. They went back about 3 00. And inside of that, the first thing they discovered was 126 of those provisional ballots that were scanned into the absentee module. What that means is in the original reporting, the absentees were 126 higher and the provisions were 126 lower. That was the first thing they found. Then while they were onsite in state farm arena, they discovered there was a box of 358 damaged ballots. What happens is when you go to provisional, you have to put it inside a provisional envelope with an explanation of the issue, signatures by people to identify it, and to figure out whether it needs to be verified or just counted. They put that through the automatic opening machine. On occasion, that knife will slice the ballot. You cannot scan a damaged ballot. The normal process is you take those ballots and replicate them on a bmd and scan those. That process should have been on friday. It was not. When they got there and discovered these, they did the replication. Republican and democrat monitors were there in the room. Like i said, our monitor was there. The processes, it went on a very long time. They got there at 3 00. They sort of tag teamed, got some people in and out, but there were always people onsite. I was there around 10 30 myself. The process took a long time. I dont have a good answer as to why it took so long, but it did. They went through the process , scanned those ballots, added to the totals, put the new ones back in. Even at the end of the day they were trying to do reconciliation one last time, they were seven ballots short. They could not find seven ballots. Someone said, did you look in the spoiled ballot been . Sure enough, that is where the seven ballots were. They were able to get to a full accounting of all those ballots. The problem we have is when people dont follow their processes and procedures. It undermines peoples faith in the overall outcomes. Its the silly little thing sometimes, people, but these details are very important, and fulton unfortunately has a history of some of this stuff. They did so much to clean up their act from the june election. I want to note a couple other things. Then theres been sort of a description, georgia suddenly flipped from republican for years to democrats. Again, anybody who has been here is aware of the fact that none of this was sudden. There was a very close race for governor in 2018. We saw people getting elected as democrats in gwinnett and cobb county for the last few years. None of this is sudden or overly surprising to the pundits who track whats going on in georgia. I do not even say you think you can say it is a massive flip when the biden lead was more than 10,000. I have not done the math since but it should be similar now. The other thing we discovered is there was a lot of ticket splitting. There are many people who did not vote for the president who did vote for david perdue or Kelly Leffler or bubba mcdonald. Or doug collins. We saw a lot of ticket splitting. You see a lot of it regionally, a lot of it in the suburbs. All of this tracks with the political environment we have seen. All of it has to do with ticket splitting. Not any sudden thing. This is the one that is a little more, for lack of a better phrasing, the hammer and scorecard issue. Frankly it doesnt make a lot of sense but will quote the director of the Cyber Security infrastructure security agency. He uses the words, its flatout a hoax and nonsense. We cant have people putting out hoax and nonsense from the people who are dedicated to protect our Cyber Infrastructure in the country. Dont buy into these things. Find trusted sources. Another thing i want to point in point out in this state, this time, this election on election day was an amazing success. We had an average two minute wait time. That is unheard of in the state. The people of georgia did a very good job of adopting the action plan and moving voting behaviors to really voting. We had 2. 7 million early in person votes. We had about a little over 1. 3 million absentee votes and 975,000 in person election day votes, which goes back to what many people thought we would mailin andto 60 absentee vote. Georgians culturally enjoy voting in person. Thats why the vast majority of them are either early in person or in person on election day. Thats what we saw a lot of, was people defaulting to type. They like being there and seeing the ballot and putting it into the scanner. We see a lot of people who believe in that system. What i dont like is people trying to undermine the system that was put together so hard by the secretarys office and county elections directors. Let me be perfectly clear on another point. We are going to find that people did illegally vote. That will happen. There are going to be double voters. There are going to be people who did not have the qualifications of a registered voter to vote in the state. That will be found. Is it 10,353 . Unlikely. But every election, as i have said every day at this podium, is imperfect. The issue now is with margins where the winner for the close closest in the country of. 2 , when the margins are this tight, every little thing matters. This office will thoroughly investigate and we will work to find ways. We know the system counted properly. We know the ballots were counted properly, we know that. We have an audit to prove and looks like more than likely the president will ask for a recount to reaffirm that. But on the front end, we need to make sure that the absentee ballot process is tight as it can be so we can stop illegal voting and prevent double voting now and in the future. With that, i will take any questions yall might have. [inaudible] we have not seen that at this time but i do believe we have some reports of it, so investigators will likely be looking into it. I do not have specific information. [inaudible] with 47 certified so far, we have 112 more to go which is not insignificant. Some of them are the larger counties. Richmond is already certified. Muskogee is already certified. But it will be a process as they continue to wrap up the final pieces of the provisionals. We feel like most of the uploads were done over the weekend and you will find the reconciliations, all the ballots were uploaded. We are trying to do them as fast as we can so we can do our risklimiting audit. And no, the decision has not been made which race that will be done on. But the outward bounds again are the counties have to certified by this friday and on the following friday, the state has to be certified. Again, is because that is the outward edge abound before we have to get the balance of military and overseas voters on saturday, november 21st. Nothing . Ok. [inaudible] can you step forward so i can hear you . [inaudible] no. What else . We also heard from allegations from the president saying that there were missing military ballots. The only thing we have was the approximately 7000 that did not make it here in time legally. I will go over those numbers again. 7786 of them did not make it here to the county in time. I wouldnt call those missing. Those are people who either didnt vote or they got lost in the usps or any of the number of ways why they didnt get there. Can you talk about the id and . The audit working we are working to get the deadline for the counties to get ballot manifest into the state is today. We cannot do the audit itself until we get certification from the counties. That gives us our final count of ballots which is input into the arlo system where a Nonpartisan Group helps us organize the risk limiting audit. Again, we are at the mercy of the last county to come in before we can get everything going. I believe, and its either tuesday or wednesday, i think, the secretary will make announcements which race will be audited. Im not sure which one it is. I just remember tuesday or wednesday and i will try to get the answer to you. Yes, sir. [inaudible] frankly, the secretary ran for this job. We took these jobs. The pressure is more internal than external to get it right. Our job is to get it right for the voters and people of georgia and for the people of the United States to make sure the outcome of this election are correct and trustworthy and at the end of the day, no matter which side of the aisle, no matter which candidate you supported, you can have trust and believe in the outcome of these things. Listen, we understand that theres one side of this country ecstatic, in the streets partying. I guess covid is over. Then you have the other side which are extremely upset. They are angry. They in their heart of hearts know in their gut that something terrible happened and their guy lost and its not fair. When you are this close and the emotions run this high, it is understandable. The president to a strong degree has a responsibility to those 72 Million People or so who voted for him to say i will go through all the legal means to make sure your book is defended. We understand that. Our job in the state is to follow the law of the state. If a judge tells us to do something else, we will do that , but our job is to follow the law. Get accurate counts as fast as we can legally. [inaudible] are there overseas ballots still being counted . I couldnt answer right now, it is down to the county level. I know they are working diligently. [inaudible] well, this is it. It was configuration issue on a single machine, one of those things where they try to get extra machinery to help the process. This is one of those things my dad calls, help does not help unless it helps. This did not help. We are looking into it so in the future we do have the extra step of verification before we deploy it and we are looking for another way basically for all of these adjudicated ballots to put the one side here and the rest can be uploaded. Which is what they did, but the process is taking longer than it should have. Wait a second. She has been patient. [inaudible] im unaware, i have heard some of the rumors but i dont have a specific thing on that. I would think normally that would be handled under the state constitution of election security, the responsibility of the county sheriff. They should be the one providing lead security for anybody. Nobody should be threatened for doing what is a Great American job to volunteer and work hard in these elections. How confident are you in the accuracy of [inaudible] we are very confident. We never had a recount so we dont know what will happen, especially with this much paper that is hand marked. With a recount and everything everyone watching and waiting and wondering, could you describe what the recount process takes . This is where we get into the fun really geeky level of insider baseball that i know you love. Essentially what it is, we have a call for an audit statewide. The decision was made internally months ago, we have something called a risklimiting audit. In doing that, you have to make a few decisions. You have to decide what it will be and the rules around that to decide the easiest for efficacy to achieve. There are many other things to feed into it, so i not going to presuppose what the secretary may or may not choose. Functionally at the county level, they have things called ballot manifests. They know how many ballots they have to do. We have ballot manifests. 10sided dice, like from dungeons and dragons. You put those into the software. Those will give you a randomized version after you put in all the ballot manifests. The computer will say in Spalding County, you pulled one ballot from batch three and Fulton County, two ballots from batch in dority county, one 77. Ballot from batch 17 around the state until you get to the scientific number that says once you run these things through and a human being reads these, they write them down, they put the results back into the system, it will give you a percentage of confidence that the outcome is correct. That is how that works. If it doesnt get to that percentage of confidence, it you do it all again for another round and add and add on until you get to that confidence level. A recount is similar but very different. There are rules around that is well defined by the state election board. Every county would have to get their ballots prepared. We did do the investment to provide a highspeed, highcapacity scanner for every county, regardless of size. Big counties had multiple. What they are going to do is they will create i misspoke slightly today. They will not take actual live ballots, they will create a test deck that they know the outcome from it. Votewill do handmarking to say, we are going to make it 42 for the president , 58 for joe biden or 56, and two for jurgensen. They run that through the scanner to say, that is the outcome we expected. Then you clear the votes off because you know the ballots the scanner is operating properly. Then you take all the ballots regardless of where they came from, the absentee which is early vote or the bmd on election day, the traditional ballots, and they get all put through the central scanners. The intent is obviously that count will be very similar to the other one. Let me caution everybody, it is going to be a little different. It always is in every recount in the history of mankind. People machines look at things slightly differently. Fundamentally, it will not be off, it will always be a little bit different. That is not suspicious. That is normal. Another thing is all the ballots that were adjudicated with ambiguous marks, over votes, they get adjudicated again, so you have a different panel of human beings making the decision. Everyone of these processes involves people. The least reliable part of all these processes is people because we are all fundamentally flawed. I guarantee you if i get a deck of 1000 votes and i give it to people to count, they will come up with a different thing every time. A computer 99 of the time is going to come up with the same outcome. That is just the way human beings are built. Humans and weng have to know that at the end of the day. You have the congresswoman [inaudible] are you aware of that . Have you looked into this issue . That would be the investigators. We get that all the time. They are very busy with people making these claims. Sheiance just sent me one, ran into somebody at the dollar general. In,y single one that comes we are going to track it down. It does not mean anything happened, it does not mean anything didnt. We have to find evidence and that is the main goal. Have you seen any evidence at illegal voting . It is a vague kind of thing. Fraud is this emotional word. For the people out there who are as irritated with people talking about voter fraud right now, they should be equally irritated with people talking about Voter Suppression two years ago. In thedermine confidence system, both are false now. That is the truth. The one thing we have to realize is illegal voting is going to happen. It is a minor part of this thing. We are putting every safeguard in place to make sure it does not happen, but again, the thing about human beings being flawed, that is going to happen. We are going to try to do everything we can. The software, the scanners, that works extremely well. Human beings have to interact with it. We have 159 counties. 330 early voting locations. Staffed by tens of thousands of poll workers who had between all the systems nearly 5 million georgians casting votes. Mistakes will be made. That is going to happen. You have to be realistic about that. Thes highlighted because tightness of the race. Yes. [inaudible] is that going to be every single election Going Forward . I would not say there was mayhem. There is processing. This state is very different than other states. We do not send out unsolicited ballots. You have to make a request online. You have to send a request with your signature. Is it has stop point to be signature matched on the backend. In this stage we know theres going to be some issue with this but we did not seem widespread issues with the absentee ballot process. The vast majority of voters voted in person on a bmd. Thank you very much. Cspans washington journal. Every day we take your calls on the news of the day and will discuss policy issues that impact you. Tuesday morning, a discussion of the Senate Leadership elections. Then we will talk about the Affordable Care act case being heard by the Supreme Court with an attorney and Health Policy expert of georgetown university. Also a discussion of the biden president ial transition with karen holt, Virginia Tech Political Science professor and white house transition project Advisory Board member. Watch cspans washington journal live at 7 00 eastern Tuesday Morning and joined the discussion with your phone calls, texts, and tweets. The Supreme Court hears oral arguments on the Affordable Care act for the consolidated cases of texas versus california and california versus texas on tuesday at 10 00 eastern on texas. The law was challenged by texas after a 2017 republican tax law eliminated the penalty for not having health care insurance. Listen to the oral arguments live at 10 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan, on at at cspan. Org Supreme Court, or on the cspan radio app. Next, a discussion on the election and Foreign Policy under a biden presidency. The Brookings Institution hosted this event which looked at morality state department, the impact of a republicancontrolled senate, the u. S. Record abroad, and future relations with europe, china, and iran. This
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