Chatham Co. election officials expecting to meet recount deadline

SAVANNAH, Ga. (WTOC) - With just a day until the deadline, the recount continues here in Chatham County.

Election workers are in the final stretch of the statewide recount working through the county’s absentee ballots.

The election supervisor says they will easily meet the deadline, but work is still ongoing.

Russell Bridges says they have scanned the Election Day and early in-person ballots and as of Tuesday afternoon, have begun on the county’s more than 41,000 absentee ballots.

These will take a bit more time as they are hand-marked and some will need to be adjudicated, but Bridges says they have a team that has been working with ballots as they go.

They have more than a dozen election workers doing this machine recount. Leaders say they haven’t tabulated any of the votes but are working to scan them all in by midnight Wednesday.

“We won’t have any problem. We are in the absentee ballots now and once we finish scanning those then we’ll do the final sanity checks to make sure we haven’t missed anything, make sure that everything is accounted correctly. If there is anything that we need to go back and review we will take care of that, once that’s done then we’ll actually generate the totals, and then we have to report those vote totals to the state and if the totals differ from what we certified previously for the election then we have to recertify,” Bridges said.

Bridges says the team here in Chatham County is hardworking and their efforts have made this process go smooth.

It is interesting to note this crew has been processing ballots from this election since the 19th so Beyond a month at this point, and election leaders say as soon as this work is complete Wednesday, they will continue working on plans for the runoff in January.

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