Georgia election official misidentified in misleading social media posts
- Published on October 24, 2024 at 21:07
- 4 min read
- By Natalie WADE, AFP USA
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"GA election official Gabriel Sterling says audits will take place after Election Day because it's 'nerve-racking' to count ballots in front of poll watchers. Since when did it become 'nerve-racking' for ballots to be counted in front of poll watchers?" says text over an October 13, 2024 Instagram video.
In the clip from CNN, an election administrator shares his concerns over hand-counting ballots and talks about vote audits -- required in Georgia and other states before the results are certified.
Ahead of Election Day on November 5, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump are pushing to earn votes in swing states such as Georgia, which President Joe Biden won back from Republicans in 2020.
Georgia was a hotbed of misinformation following that contest, including conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines and voter fraud. Trump and his allies amplified the claims, casting doubt on the results.
On October 22, 2024, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected a request to immediately reinstate a new election rule pushed by pro-Trump members of the Georgia State Election Board, which a county judge had previously ruled was "illegal, unconstitutional and void" (archived here and here). The new rule would have required poll workers to hand-count ballots, which many county election officials said would slow results and burden poll workers.
However, the clip circulating online does not show comments from Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state's office -- and the posts misrepresent the subject of the CNN interview.
The broadcaster identifies the man as Joseph Kirk, the elections supervisor in Bartow County (archived here).
His comments came in response to reporter Donie O'Sullivan asking him about the new rule that would have required hand-counting ballots in addition to machine tabulation as soon as election night.
A keyword search uncovered the full CNN transcript and a related article in which Kirk says he fears the rule could cause errors, such as poll workers miscalculating ballots after working long hours on Election Day (archived here and here).
Here are Kirk's full remarks in the video shared online:
Kirk: I want to be clear, I don't have a problem at hand counting ballots. There's different times to do that, there's different reasons to do that and the process, you know, we go through is called an audit.
O'Sullivan: Joseph Kirk is the election administrator in the county next to Salleigh's.
Kirk: But we do it after the election, in a controlled environment where it's easier to observe, easier to monitor the process and my folks have a chance to rest first. We're just giving folks a chance to make a mistake. We're just having very, very tired, in many cases, senior citizens try to hand-count stuff in front of people, which can be nerve-wracking.
Georgia, along with several other US states, requires officials to conduct risk-limiting audits before certifying state and federal election results (archived here and here).
"The scale of the audit is determined by the method and the reported election margin; as the margin of victory narrows, the number of ballots expected to be audited rapidly increases," the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Lab says on its website (archived here).
During the procedure, which is distinct from vote counting, officials check a random sample of paper ballots to verify results. Georgia's 2020 risk-limiting audit -- which included a hand recount -- affirmed Biden's narrow victory in the state.
Such audits are "open to observation by the public," a Georgia secretary of state spokesperson told PolitiFact.
AFP contacted the secretary of state’s office for comment, but a response was not forthcoming.
More of AFP's reporting on misinformation about the 2024 US election is available here.
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