Cobb election results certified; Biden projected Ga. winner

Cobb election results certified

As a hand recount of Cobb votes in the presidential race began on Friday, the county’s elections board certified all the other the results from last week’s general election.

By a 5-0 vote, the Cobb Board of Elections and Registration—a five-member appointed body—voted to certify the results of a variety of county, state and federal races as well as local and statewide ballot issues.

In recapping the elections process, Cobb Elections Director Janine Eveler said that “election day went very smoothly” and chalked up much of that to early and absentee voting “that took a lot of the pressure” off of staff and poll workers at 145 precincts.

She said a total of 396,549 ballots were counted in Cobb County—that’s 73.76 percent of the 537,611 registered eligible voters: 174,979 cast ballots in person, and another 148,498 votes were counted via mail/absentee.

The elections board vote came a few hours after Eveler and her staff began the laborious hand recount process in the presidential race. That was ordered on Wednesday by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Democratic former vice president Joe Biden leads in Georgia by 14,116 points and has 49.52 percent of the vote, while Republican president Donald Trump has 49.24 percent of the vote with nearly 5 million votes cast.

In Cobb, Biden got 56 percent of the vote, although most precincts in East Cobb favored Trump.

The Trump campaign has charged voter fraud in a number of states where the voting has been close. In Georgia, Republican U.S. senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler have asked for Raffensperger to resign. He said he won’t be doing that, and urged his fellow GOP office-holders to focus on their Jan. 5 runoff campaigns.

On Friday afternoon, several news outlets projected Biden the winner in Georgia. He would be the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to do so. Trump also has been projected to be the winner in North Carolina.

Pennsylvania and Arizona also have been projected for Biden, who by most estimates currently has 290 electoral votes, 20 more than needed.

But only in Georgia is a hand recount taking place. Cobb Elections has brought on 80 people for now to count the presidential vote from those 396,549 ballots.

They’ll have until Wednesday at 11:59 p.m.—the deadline Raffensperger set for all 159 counties to finish—and Eveler said in Cobb the counters will include full-time elections office staffers, poll workers, absentee ballot counters and others.

They got training and final instructions before the recounting began at 9 a.m. The counters are working in 40 teams of two people per table who were randomly assigned and didn’t know one another beforehand.

The state Democratic and Republican parties have assigned designated monitors, and the public is invited to watch as well in an observation area that Eveler said “is quite large, actually.”

The counting is going on from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Jim Miller Park (2245 Callaway Road, Marietta). Late Friday afternoon, the county said 115,000 ballots have been examined thus far, and the work will continue Saturday.

During the elections board meeting, Cobb Democratic Party chairwoman Jackie Bettadapur commended Cobb Elections for its election-day performance, but blasted the hand recount, calling Republicans “sore losers” who were demanding “expensive political theater.”

The county is expected to pick up the tab for the hand recount, and Eveler said it’s possible more shifts will be added to meet the Wednesday deadline. Georgia elections must be certified by next Friday, Nov. 20.

“It will take however many people it takes, and it will cost whatever it’s going to cost, and that’s what we have to do,” she said in the above video produced by the Cobb County Communications Office.