2,755 uncounted votes found on memory card in Fayette County, officials say

Secretary of State’s Office gives update on audit at 4 p.m. on Tuesday

Gabriel Sterling, the head of elections infrastructure for the Georgia Secretary of State's Office, said there were 2,755 uncounted votes on a memory card in Fayette County.

ATLANTA - As the election audit continues in Georgia, the Secretary of State's Office announced there were 2,755 uncounted votes on a memory card in Fayette County.

Georgia Secretary of State election official Gabriel Sterling made the announcement during a 4 p.m. news conference Tuesday.

"There was an issue where we noticed there were more people on the absentee ballot filed for voting in-person in Fayette County than was in the actual reporting," Sterling said. "It was discovered today for certain. Because of the audit, we found this. There were several places where the county should have seen this. "There were several human beings that didn't follow procedure."

Fayette County ballot hand recount

Human error resulted in a net gain of a few hundred votes for President Trump, election officials said.

Sterling said with the uncounted votes, the margin between President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden in Georgia shifts to 12,929 in favor of Biden. Fayette County will recertify the results with the discovered votes on Wednesday.

This is the second county where votes uncounted votes were discovered. On Monday, the Secretary of State's office announced an error found in Floyd County where 2,600 ballots were left uncounted prior to the county's initial certification. The error was discovered on Sunday during the third day of the state’s audit.

"We did have an issue with a scanner at the polling location where the undercount occurred. That will be the starting point for our investigation. As of now, we believe it was a technical issue caused by human error," Melanie Conrad with the Floyd County Board of Elections wrote in a statement released to FOX 5 News.

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According to officials, the election in Floyd County was actually being run by a volunteer after the director contracted COVID-19 and another election official broke a hip, having to be hospitalized.

In an update, Sterling said that the situation is being addressed and that Floyd County will rescan all early votes to recertify the vote totals. The county had already finished its audit of the votes by hand.

In total, the ballots uncovered in the county reduce former Vice President Joe Biden's vote total over President Donald Trump by 800 votes - changing the percentages slightly, but not enough to change the final outcome in the state.

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As of Tuesday, the Secretary of State's Office said 4.7 million out of 5 million votes cast had been hand-counted in the audit with most of Georgia's counties reporting minor or no discrepancies.

Sterling said the audit is doing what it was intended to do by making sure all the votes have been counted. He said a vast majority of counties have found very few or no deviations in their numbers. So far, 57 counties have found none, 21 have only found a plus or minus of one vote, and only 32 counites have been off by a few digits.

The Secretary of State's Office has set a deadline of midnight Wednesday for counties to submit their audit results. Once the results from the audit are certified, the losing campaign can request a recount, which will be done using scanners that read and tally the votes.

The deadline for the state to certify the results of the election is Nov. 20.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.