Possible runoff? Chatham County Elections Board to count 4,000 memory card votes today
Most of Chatham County's votes were tallied on election night, but about 4,000 early votes remain on a memory card Wednesday morning, due to a file naming convention error.
And for one local race in particular, those votes could change the results of the election.
Roger Moss holds a comfortable 10,000-vote lead on Tye Whitely and Todd Rhodes in the race for Savannah-Chatham School Board President, but his total puts him just above the threshold to win without a runoff.
If a significant number of those 4,000 votes go for Whitely and Rhodes, that would deny Moss a majority and force a runoff round on June 21.
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Why is Chatham still counting votes?
Board of Elections Supervisor Billy Wooten says the early votes were from one of the two separate ballot scanners used in the 1117 Eisenhower Drive early voting location, where both the Board of Elections and Board of Registrars' offices are located.
The Eisenhower Drive early voting site was the only early voting site to have more than one scanner. Once the early voting period is over, each scanner tallies the votes, and they are saved to a memory card.
The issue here is that both memory cards were given the same name, and when uploading the votes to the Secretary of State, the system read the cards as duplicates, even though they were from separate scanners, Wooten said.
"When you go to load them into the election results system that the state has, it's not going to recognize two cards by the same name. So, once we loaded one, which had about 4,300 votes on it, or a little bit more, we couldn't load a second one."
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Wooten said starting Wednesday at 11 a.m., the BOE will begin using the paper ballots to tally the votes from the card, a solution provided by the Dominion voting system that was not offered by Georgia's previous voting system.
"It'll take a little while to scan them, maybe two or three hours, but we'll take our time and do it right," Wooten said. "That's the beauty of the system. We've got a backup."
He said the public is welcome to come to watch the vote-counting process at 1117 Eisenhower Drive.
Wooten says he expects the missing votes to be included in the full vote count by Wednesday afternoon. But those aren't the only ballots that still need to be counted in Chatham.
Wooten said 71 provisional ballots were cast on Tuesday. Provisional ballots are cast by voters who go to the wrong polling place, or those who are unable to vote in person due to equipment errors.
Additionally, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA, ballots cast overseas have until Friday to arrive. These usually aren’t enough to sway an election result in large races, but have a greater effect on smaller county races.
Will Peebles is the enterprise reporter for Savannah Morning News. He can be reached at wpeebles@gannett.com and @willpeeblessmn on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah-Chatham school board presidents race could head to runoff
