Chatham Co. will continue counting absentee ballots on Thursday

CHATHAM COUNTY, Ga. (WTOC) - UPDATE: The Chatham County Board of Elections released new information Wednesday afternoon, saying 107,353 votes were included in the unofficial and incomplete returns on Election Night, and included 15,078 absentee-by-mail ballots. Elections officials are working to process and county approximately 25,000 additional absentee-by-mail ballots. 9,425 of those ballots were incorporated into the unofficial and incomplete returns on Wednesday evening.

Counting the remaining absentee ballots will start again on Thursday morning.

UPDATE: Early in-person votes were some of the first to be tabulated and added into the unofficial results, with thousands more in absentee and in-person Election Day voting, too.

And Wednesday morning, more absentee ballots verified by the Registrar’s Office will be tallied up over the next few days to ultimately give us results. We asked the board of Elections chairman realistically how soon that can happen.

“We could even possibly certify on Friday, but we’d have to call a special meeting to do that. We’ve already got a board meeting scheduled for Monday, so I think...I’m very confident that we should be able to wrap everything up this week and then use Monday to wrap up the last details hopefully, and then go ahead and certify at our board meeting on Monday,” Chatham County Board of Elections Chairman Tom Mahoney said.

Around 15,000 absentee ballots were tabulated last night, those are ballots that already went through processing and were ready to be counted. Over the next day or so, ballots will be added to the final unofficial tally, and the chairman explained how many he believes that could be.

“I think it’s safe to say that we’re expecting to be able to add up to about 20,000 or even more ballots to what we had in last nights unofficial and incomplete returns.”

With several close local races, and potentially state races that could be affected by more votes being tallied, we asked the Board of Elections chairman if he thought it was premature to assume victory in tight races.

“Absolutely. That’s my opinion, I think it would be premature. Now there’s gonna be political prognosticators, they do polls with samples of 500 or 600 voters and call a nation-wide race. I don’t know how they do that, but that’s their business. Our business is counting the votes.”

Mahoney says he isn’t confident in the remaining ballots being processed and tabulated Wednesday, which could mean another day or so of processing.

This means they would not meet the expectation from the Secretary of State to have all votes tabulated by the end of Wednesday.

“I don’t have that confidence. I understand the Secretary thinks that we can, and there was the worker that I talked to earlier, and she expressed optimism. I just don’t think we can process potentially that many votes in one day. And I don’t know how much they were able to accomplish this morning, and there’s more votes being delivered that we haven’t even received yet.”

So, for close races, thousands more absentee votes could make a big difference.

We have been watching the Chatham county race for district attorney and with 100% precincts reporting, Shalena Cook Jones holds about 1500 more votes than incumbent Meg Heap.

Jones was obviously happy with the results, but she says she is cautiously optimistic knowing the results are not certified or official at this point. But she feels like voters heard her message for equality and change.

She wants to address mass incarceration, parody in sentencing, and make sure victims are represented. She says the whole race has been about endurance and with what we know the race continues though she’s encouraged by the initial results.

Shalena says she doesn’t want to be hasty there will be time to celebrate when the vote is official but says she looks forward to future.

PREVIOUS STORY: There are a number of races to watch in Chatham County Tuesday evening.

One of the races everyone is voting on is who they want to see lead the Chatham County Commission as Chairman.

The current chairman, Al Scott, was term limited after being elected in 2012.

Both of those running to fill the seat are no strangers to public service.

Chester Ellis is the current vice chair for the Chatham County Commission, representing District 8 since 2016. He says he knows the county and all the issues they are facing being a part of the commission for the past four years.

He wants to improve services, balance the budget and to continue the work they started and feels he’s the man to take the county to the next level.

Meanwhile his opponent is Jason Buelterman, while he hasn’t sat on commission he has been Tybee Island’s mayor. He served there for 14 years and feels that his leadership propelled that community forward and wants to do the same for Chatham County.

He says his goals are to upgrade the emergency communication system, use county resources more efficiently, and create a financial plan to improve the county’s bond rating to bring new energy.

We spoke with them earlier this week about their priorities, should they be elected.

“The first thing I would want to do is to bring together all of the mayors, aldermans of all the municipalities, so that they can understand the county’s blueprint. That way they can understand the counties masterplan so we all will be working in the same direction," said Ellis.

“First off is getting, you know managing this pandemic. It’s going to have budgetary impact on the county and you don’t want to raise taxes, but you also don’t want to cut services so we’ve got to figure out a way to do that to get through this situation. Hopefully it will, you know hopefully it will be sometime in early 2021 when we kind of get through this, but it could be even longer so that’s number one and then number two trying to work together," said Buelterman.

Both men say they were glad to see so many vote, and encourage those who haven’t to do so.

Another race Chatham County residents will be deciding on is who will be District Attorney.

Meg Heap currently holds the position and has done so since 2012. She feels her accomplishments speak for themselves.

Since filling the role she has created a special victims unit, family justice center, expanded programs for at risk youth, and more.

Meanwhile her challenger, Shalena Cook Jones, feels she could better serve the country to be more efficient, equitable and effective. If elected the lead prosecutor in the county, she wants to create a charging and sentencing review panel, direct time talent and resources to cases that deserve it, and protect the rights of victims.

We reached out to both campaigns to see if they would be willing to talk but neither have returned our requests.

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