Chatham Co. election workers will return Monday to continue recount

SAVANNAH, Ga. (WTOC) - Georgia counties are recounting ballots following a request by President Donald Trump’s campaign.

With a difference of thousands of votes between the President and President-elect Joe Biden, Georgia law allows for the losing candidate to challenge the results if the margin is narrow enough.

A team of about 10 Chatham County Board of Elections workers have gone home for the day and holiday and will be back at it on Monday next week.

Counties have until midnight next Wednesday to complete the recount, and the elections supervisor says he anticipates Chatham County’s recount will likely take until Tuesday.

The recount team is scanning more than 134,000 ballots through machines, a process that started around eight this morning.

If they don’t encounter any issues, the machines can process 60 ballots a minute.

But the elections supervisor said it wasn’t quite smooth sailing as the recount began Wednesday morning.

“The ballots have been handled so much between the election processing and the hand audit we just went through that we’re finding that the people were handling the ballots using the sticky finger material, and some of that’s on the ballots and it’s causing some of the ballots to kick back in the scan,” Chatham County Elections Supervisor Russell Bridges said.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for that. Bridges says the workers have been able to wipe that material off and successfully fun those ballots through the machine to be recounted.