Due to discrepancies in the recount and certified vote count totals, the Habersham County Board of Elections is delaying certification of the recount results in the District 4 Habersham County Commission race. The completed recount shows the previous 8-vote margin between candidates Bruce Harkness and Trent Davis has widened to 16 votes but there is a net 24-vote discrepancy compared to the number of the previously counted votes. More early voting and absentee mail ballots were tallied in the recount, and fewer election day ballots were included in the scanning, creating that discrepancy.
State Representative Terry Rogers (R-Clarkesville) says the Secretary of State’s Office is aware of issues that surfaced during the recount.
One of the candidate’s supporters reached out to Rogers Thursday afternoon. “I set up a conference call,” Rogers tells Now Habersham. “The Secretary of State is aware of it and looking at all the options.”
Before the board announced its decision to hold off on certifying the results, they gave Marilyn Marks, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance, an opportunity to speak.
She asked the board to hold off certifying the results until they had carefully reviewed them. That is what the board is going to do, says Elections Board Chair Carroll Jeffers. He said the board will talk with the Secretary of State’s Office and come up with a “plan of action” to deal with the discrepancies.
Going into the recount only eight votes separated Cornelia businessman Trent Davis and Demorest attorney Bruce Harkness in their bid for a spot in the August 11 runoff.
Habersham County election officials spent 20 hours over two days recounting the June 9 GOP primary ballots in the District 4 Commission race.
Five members of the Board of Elections, including election supervisor Laurel Ellison, along with county elections assistant Olivia Schapansky and two representatives of Dominion Voting Systems spent Wednesday and Thursday sorting, scanning, and adjudicating ballots.
At one point in the process, a Dominion tech assisting with the recount located a batch of “unvalidated” votes in the computer. The recount also revealed a discrepancy in the number of ballots cast at one of the county’s early voting precincts. There “should have been 1337 votes,” explained Ellison. “It only rescanned 1332 [votes].” When election board members counted the number of ballots by hand they determined there were 1332. Ellison indicated the previously recorded number may have been a clerical error.
Questions and objections
Not only did the numbers not match up, but the overall process raised questions.
It took Habersham County election officials three hours Wednesday to decide how to recount the ballots after Marilyn Marks, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance, objected to how they were planning to do it. At one point, Schapansky sharply rebuked Marks insisting they were following Georgia’s election code. When Marks asked Ellison to write down the process they were going to follow, Ellison declined. Instead, she announced the process to everyone in the room and asked Davis – the only candidate present – if he was comfortable with it.
Davis was legally allowed to be in the elections office to observe the proceedings, as were any of the candidates, members of the public, and media. The law requires recounts to be held in the open so that the process is transparent. However, due to the way that the county elections office is designed, the computer used for the recount is located in a small side room the size of a closet. Because of that, and to accommodate the legal requirement for transparency, election officials allowed Davis and others to take turns viewing what was happening inside the computer room.
Harkness and others on social media mischaracterized a Now Habersham photo showing Davis observing as supposed evidence of election meddling. Harkness has since removed his social media post and apologized.
“It did not appear that the process that was being used was the State process,” he said of the photo showing Davis sitting near the computer room where the votes were being counted. “Maybe it was the room constraints, but it made me and a lot of other people uncomfortable. I’m not questioning their integrity whatsoever nor of the [elections] office up there,” he says. “It was just the appearance of the way it was happening, a lot of people were concerned and I assured everybody that Trent Davis is a fine gentleman and I would defend him against people who would accuse him of wrongdoing.”
Harkness adds, “I made some statements in the heat of the moment that maybe I should not have made and, so, I retracted those statements and issued an apology. I just hope our system can get fixed.”
Davis’ mother-in-law, former Habersham County Commissioner Lynne Dockery, also legally observed the recount process. In an interview with Now Habersham on June 24, Dockery said she was “somewhat” satisfied with how it was being conducted.
“In the end, we can still always file an objection to the recount if it ends up that we’re not satisfied with what the process was that they used ’cause it sounds like they were making the process up as they went, in a way,” says Dockery.
As discrepancies surfaced over the two-day long recount, Dockery’s concern grew.
She’s not alone.
The big picture
The Habersham County Commission race feeds into a larger narrative about the fallibility of the state’s new voting system.
Dominion, the Denver based company that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger awarded a lucrative $104 million contract to in 2019, installed some 30,000 of its touchscreen-to-printed ballot machines across the state ahead of the twice-delayed primaries. The machines replaced the touchscreen machines the state used for 17 years amid concerns of hacking and lack of a paper trail.
The state’s investment in new hardware and software has done little to appease those concerned about the integrity of Georgia’s elections.
Immediately following the June 9 primary, election officials in at least four counties – Dekalb, Morgan, Clarke, and Cherokee – raised red flags about the software and vote-tabulation scanners used to count mail-in ballots.
In Banks County, a commission race flipped following a hand recount election officials conducted after the re-scanned count came up different from the scanned votes on election night. And in Cobb County, a judge issued an injunction in the House District 35 Democratic primary amid reports of equipment failures and other issues.
Marks says the Habersham County recount displays flaws in the new voting system and the Secretary of State’s and State Election Board’s “lack of planning and understanding of basic election security and election integrity principles.”
“The software configurations conflict with the State Board’s recount rules, and their recount instructions become nonsensical resulting in a recount process in which few could feel confident,” Marks says.
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This article has been updated
