Georgia’s second largest county predicts recount will be completed today

Georgia’s Gwinnett County election supervisor, Kristi Royston, says the audit underway is “moving along nicely” and she predicts that the hand counting portion will conclude this evening.

The results would be uploaded into the state’s server well ahead of the Wednesday 11:59:59 p.m. deadline. Royston estimated 200,000 ballots out of the 416,000 cast remain to be audited.

The election official said the county – Georgia’s second largest – does not track discrepancies between the initial results and the audited results.

The secretary of state’s office tracks and compiles that data and previously said it would only release the results when all counties have completed the audit.

Asked about President Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in the state, Royston said, “I have not seen anything that would concern me,” and that she “trusts the system.”

As for the Trump tweet calling the recount “fake” because elections officials are “not allowing signatures to be looked at and verified,” Royston explained that doing so would be impossible in any audit or recount because there is no way to tie an absentee ballot back to the envelope it arrived in – and that is by design.

“Signature verification is completed before that ballot is ever opened and scanned the first time,” she said. “That ballot does not go back with the envelope because then you would lose voter secrecy.”

Remember: Georgia’s secretary of state announced last week that the state would conduct an audit of the 2020 presidential race, recounting by hand the millions of ballots cast in the state. CNN, alongside other major news outlets, projected Biden will win the 2020 presidential election. On Friday, CNN projected Biden will win Georgia.

CNN