The Bartow County Board of Elections and Voter Registration is pleased to announce it completed its voluntary audit of the January 5th Runoff Election. The runoff between David Perdue and Jon Ossoff was randomly selected to be audited by the official monitors. The auditing process teams of two auditors counted every ballot by hand. The audit’s purpose was not to confirm the exact machine tallies but to prove that Bartow County did not declare the wrong winner.
Auditors are human and often make small mistakes during a hand count, and as a result, the board expects to see a small margin of error. Initial data shows that the overall margin of error was .01%. Within a week, the board will release a report that goes into more detail about where errors occurred and the tally sheets used during the audit on their website (www.bartowelections.org ).
The entire process was open to the public and conducted under official monitors’ observation from both political parties. Auditors granted the monitors meaningful access to the process. They were able to watch everything from the moment elections employees arrived with the ballots until they loaded them back onto the truck to return to their office. The board appreciates everyone who volunteered their time to observe this process. They played a critical role, and it would not have been an effective audit without them.
The audit was completed in one day, with the overall cost at approximately $3,000. The board hopes this helps restore trust in the election process in Bartow County. The ballot that each voter cast in the runoff is a piece of paper that cannot be changed once it is cast. The auditors looked at the same human-readable text that the voters saw before scanning their ballot to cast their vote. As such, the audit demonstrates that the voting system accurately counted the January 5th Runoff Election results.