LIVE: Georgia Secretary of State Holds Press Conference on Elections

Which is a record, which is tremendous. Now since Friday, we have received these absentee ballots and we've actually accepted about 3,000 more. So as of just a few minutes ago, there's 122,892 absentee ballots that have been accepted, which brings us now to 2,828,147. Well, that will increase over the day. That's because we actually have about 42,000 absentee ballots that still will be coming in and some may come in today with the mail and everyone's going to be looking at them to see if they are approved and if they are, then they're accepted and they'll go on this election data hub. I think everyone's, some people are asking this question is why are we having such huge numbers of people showing up to vote? And I think you have to really say that, number one, voters, Georgians, trust our election process. What they know, and what we have shown in the last several cycles, is our elections are free, fair, and fast, and quick results. And when you have that all coming together, people trust the results. And so I think that's really important. Now we've actually done the first citizenship verification. People from Washington, D.C. have been saying that there's all these people that are non-citizens that are voting in elections getting on these voter lists. And so we started our first citizenship verification in 2022, followed up in 2024, and then we did another one in 2026. That's three of them. What is really a shame is that some states still to this day have never done one. And the nice thing is after we went through that process, there weren't that many. One is too many. You may hear that clearly, one is too many, but we want to make sure we have a clean list. And so we do our auditing and we feel really good where we are. Independent organizations do their audit, but also the state senate made sure that it got funded and it took 15 months, $5 million for the department audits to take a look at our voter list. They looked at the work that the department of driver service was doing, what the counties were doing, and also our office. Put it all together, they said that our list is 99.9% accurate. When you have that kind of confidence that you have an accurate voter list, that really goes down to the voters, that they know that only American citizens, only Georgian citizens, lawful, eligible voters are voting here in Georgia. That builds trust. Georgia strikes the proper balance between security and accessibility. Sometimes people say we want to make sure it's very, very secure. But they then somehow are concerned about what we have with accessibility. We make sure we have photo ID for all forms of voting. Every Georgian should be aware of that. If people are voting absentee, and right now it's just over 4%, every one of them have been identified primarily through their driver's license number, so we know that is the person. We do include signature match, but we added that additional layer, and it shows you that we actually know who these voters are. That builds trust. So we feel really good where we are. Well, I want to let you know that tomorrow morning, 7 a.m., the door is open. It's going to kind of be like the Kentucky Derby, you know, all those horses are going to run out of the gate. And when they're going to be, you know, the precincts, about 2,400 of them, you know, the voters will have their first chance if they're going to be voting in person. Any voter that's actually, you know, hasn't voted yet, what I would tell you to do is before we hit tomorrow, Go ahead and go to my voter page that's mvp.sos.ga.gov to verify where you're supposed to go out and vote. Some precincts have moved. My personal precinct actually has moved from a library to a high school. Now we voted early so it didn't matter but at the end of the day I don't need you showing up tomorrow especially if it's at the end of the day and you're at the wrong precinct You know, it's going to create a lot of stress for you and just additional work for the poll workers. So please check your, you know, where you're supposed to be registered to vote, where you're supposed to show what, not register, but where you're supposed to be voting tomorrow. And also your county election office will have that same information. So make sure you have the right place to vote. Circle them back. We don't expect anyone to trust us. And so what we do. We prove that through audits. We do that making sure we have a clean voter list, making sure only American citizens, making sure we have photo ID, making sure we have a verifiable paper ballot. But then after tomorrow, you're going to see what happens at 7.01 and before 8 o'clock by state law. Every county is supposed to be reporting all their accepted absentee ballots and all the early votes. And that's supposed to happen and be uploaded and be reported and be on the election data hub. So all of you can see that also before 8 p.m. And we think that builds trust. And that's a tremendous benefit for us. And then after that, tomorrow night, the results will be pouring in. And then after we button this thing up, we all go to bed. Well, before one o'clock, one before three o'clock, I like to go to bed early, so I want to be done before midnight. And so that's what I've said. We did that in 2024. There's no reason why we won't do it here tomorrow. But once we're done or you think we're done, we're not really done because we put into state law that we're going to do 20 risk limiting audits. Some states don't even do one. A lot of states now are starting to do risk limiting audits and they're doing one, usually at the top of the ticket. Back in the primary of 2024 here, we actually did two. Remember that a few months ago? We've now stepped it up to 20. So what is a risk-limiting audit? There will be 14 audits of every single congressional race. That's 14 there, plus six for all the statewide races. It's really a statistical analysis, a strong sampling, and the closer that race is, the more we're going to sample, and I think we'll have some close races. I just don't know which one, and I don't think you do either. Now, we'll find out how accurate the pollsters are and all the political pundits. At the end of the day, our job is to do our job, and so we'll do the risk limiting audits. Then, to kind of layer the security and the comfort and the trust on top is all of these ballots that we have. And right now we're at, you know, 2.8, throw over 1 million tomorrow to somewhere, you know, and I don't want to throw out a number because that's not my job. It'll be what it is. But there'll be over 3.8 million ballots out there. I don't know what number that'll be, but at the end of the day, every one of those have a scanned ballot image, and that happens at the precinct. And so what we're going to then do is we have these ballot images, we can go ahead and we scan those and we record the vote that way. What that does is another way of verifying the accuracy of the machines and the accuracy of the count. And so in effect, there will be two audits that we're going to be having to verify the results. So that kind of gives you a brief overview of View of where we are. I think I feel good where we are process-wise. You know, Blake. Our state election director is back there. He's going to be very, very busy tonight, and he'll be up early tomorrow, but he feels that the counties are in good shape, and we're monitoring them, making sure everything's good to go, working with our investigators, making sure they're going to be fully deployed throughout the entire state, making sure the counties are covered. And we understand that there'll be independent observers, not just the Republican and Democratic Party observers, but there'll be the Carter Center, and we understand the DOJ will have their observers, and there'll be other organizations and individuals that'll be out there observing that. We have a process for that, and we love transparency. And that's why we're here talking to you today, to take any questions you might have. And with that, does anyone have any questions? Secretary, Can we start with the situation going at DeKalb and Cobb where you had some delayed absentee ballots. First of all, how do you, if someone is sitting there still hasn't gotten their absentee ballot, what should they do? Reach their county election office, should they plan on voting? And then down the road, how do you deal with the situation where third party vendors are not getting absentee ballots out in time? What I would say, first of all, the counties really have been proactive on that. If any of the voters said, well, I just got my absentee ballot this past week, they had a process, well, we're going to go ahead and send you overnight another ballot and also return overnight mail so they could handle that. And then that satisfied those folks that were concerned about that. So we're on that. How do you handle a third-party vendor? Well, Coming out of the construction business, when you mess up big time, you didn't get the contract when they had another project coming along. So it always was about performance. And so I'm sure that that is one way that will get handled. And they'll be digging into that and wanting answers. And I'm sure that the counties justly so want to make sure that whoever they put in charge of that, that's a responsible job, make sure they get it done right. Yes, sir. We recently heard President Donald Trump say he will respect election results if they are honest elections. What are you prepared to say or do if President Donald Trump and Republicans discredit the election results here in Georgia if it ends up in favor of the Democrats? Well, at the end of the day, we know that we're going to have an accurate election. We have a verifiable paper ballot. We have a clean voter list. And then we're going to have quick results. And then we have observers taking a look at that. And then we're actually then going to do an audit. A risk limiting audit, and then the scanned ballot image audit, that's another audit that you have. So those ballots are going to be counted, so we know that's not going to be an issue here in Georgia. At the end of the day, we've been shown to be very clear that we'll push back on any kind of misinformation that's put out there, because we don't want our voters to be misled. I'm really grateful that they haven't been. I know there's a subsection of that, but... UGA did a poll, and over 90% of them said, we trust our poll workers. The poll workers are going to do a good job tomorrow. Read about it tomorrow? Well, we're always thinking about things, and that's our job. That's Blake's job. That's really our IT, everyone, counties. We work on that. We do tabletops to get prepared for this. And so, obviously, where we are right now, the biggest issue would be, you know, things that we've seen in the past. You know, we've gotten these fake bomb scares, and then all of a sudden it delays, you know, voting. And we're trying to find out real quickly, is it fake? And when, you know, some person is so foolish to send out their bomb scare with Russian alphabet on it, we can tell that that's not from around here. And then we obviously lean into both, you know, our state resources, law enforcement and FBI. It can help to dispel those real quick, because that just delays the process and extends out voting reporting at the end of the night. And then any kind of deep fakes, the only person that will be coming to the podium tomorrow will be me. It won't be some deep fake, so we want to make sure we get that out there, and we'll be very proactive looking out for that. That's why we're really grateful for our federal partners and our state partners. It helps us be on top of that. Yes? Well, that really depends, because how close is it going to be? Because I've actually been Secretary of State when we've had less than 50 ballot differences on statehouse races. We've had them, I think, even less than 20. So that's how close they can be. At the end of the day, that's why we have a paper ballot. That's why we can do a 100% hand recount if we had to if it gets that close for whatever race. The beautiful thing about the scanned ballot image, it's not just the top of the ticket, it's every single race. Just another way of, you know, really having belts and suspenders to verify the accuracy of the count. So it depends on how close it is for each individual race, and there's lots of races out there. It's not just the big ones, which I know is what people are focused in on, the 20 that we're going to do risk-limiting audits. But if you're running for the state house, you think that's a real important race. If you're running for the county commissioner, But we even have county librarians, water and sewer board races. So a lot of different races. It's America. We like to have participatory democracy here. Yes, sir? There are some precincts in Gwinnett County that are at Spanish-speaking churches, precincts across the state probably. Have you gotten any intel from the Trump Administration about any additional Well, I think they've already had some of those folks during early voting in other locations, actually, I believe up in Whitfield County, and people just continue to vote. And at the end of the day, it should give everyone great confidence that the Department of Audits, an outside agency, looked at our voter list. And they verified that our list is 99.9% accurate. They identified less than 250 non-citizens. We had about 200. They had 220. And then we went ahead and we checked, and we made sure that everyone had been pulled off. And that's really important, that those are Americans. So if you're not registered to vote, you're not showing up. And we've already shown you're not going to have non-citizens on the voter list. We feel good where we are. Yes, sir? Mr. Secretary, for Swiss National Television, would you say that these – Well, once we had a verifiable paper ballot, that was in state election law well before we had the 2020 election. So we were going to do one risk-limiting audit. But the General Assembly, we expanded it to two, and then we expanded it to 20. It just builds more confidence in it. The interesting thing, there's nothing in the United States Constitution or the state constitution that says lines have to be shorter than one hour. And no one says that by the state, any constitution, that you also have to report those results for the early voting. You know, one hour after polls close, but what that does is it builds trust and confidence, and that came from a peer-reviewed study from Professor Charles Stewart of MIT. Three things you can do, quick results, short lines, and your candidate wins. Well, we can't determine who the candidate is. We're going to report the facts on that one, but we certainly can do something on these other two, and it really just builds trust. And I just would encourage every state to do that, wherever you see long lines, because the counties, Really take that seriously, and they really have dealt with it, and they're working hard. Oh, by the way, we will be monitoring it, and we'll report that tomorrow when you ask how long are the lines. We'll say average wait time, longest wait time is like 47 minutes or something like that. And we say how many precincts have those 47, but we know we'll have average wait time probably less than five minutes like we have in the past. It's really just a confidence builder, and it really helps the process. A warrant could be issued especially if Fulton County is close in during the process of certification or or anything like that if we have races and those key races like the race for governor where we have a close margin I'm not really concerned about that. We're going to have two audits, and we can do a 100% hand recount. And I think we just let that process play out. In your last election review, federal election certifying, what do you plan to do after your office? Well, we'll talk about that after Wednesday sometime next week, but let's get this one done, because I think that's everyone's focus. They want to make sure that we had an election that was free, fair, and fast, that was secure but also accessible, and we lead the country on so many of those metrics. That 99.9% accurate voter list, that's the highest in the entire country. Those short lines and those quick results, we actually beat Florida, and the reason we do is because we have such a huge percentage that vote early. Now, there's just 30 minutes, but that is just on, you know, some of the absentee ballots. But they're still accepting them and actually going through that process. So our percentage of our total vote is well before anyone else. So we do things like that, and that's why we really feel good where we are. Our job is to make sure tomorrow it's free, fair, and fast. And at the end of the day, you know, we'll have the results. So you don't have to just believe us. We can prove it. Oh, yes, sir. What they can take and there was confusion in terms of getting the film But in terms of notes these ballots are much longer Yeah, sometimes people will actually have a, you know, a ballot that they've, you know, has been available on their county website of who they want to vote for, so they just go through there, or on a constitutional amendment, they just want to make sure they've got it right and you can bring that in, and that's really it, but they can't bring in phones because now that you could use your phone as really, you know, a camera, and so that's kind of, you know, state law is pretty clear on that. No, the General Assembly never funded anything for that, but at the end of the day, they had other places they wanted to spend their money, but we've done logic and accuracy testing. So we had to do that before, and then after we have the election, we come back to Bristol Meeting Audit. It verifies the ballots. The actual count of the machines and then the accuracy of the results. And then when we do the scan ballot images, it shows you whether do you have for Linda or Bob, Charlie or Sue. And so you'll know that that is actually, you know, 100 percent of every single race. So that also, again, shows you that the machines accurately recorded it. So it would show up then. So we feel good that we have the process in place. But we've also done a lot of pre-testing, and that's, you know, something that Blake and his team oversee. So we feel good. When you go through a process like this, how confident are you that you're able to sway any skeptics out there about the voting system? Have you heard of anyone changing their tune? Oh, the best way to change someone's tune is actually to volunteer to be a poll worker. And that's when they start changing their tune. And we've had nearly 100% success on that. Remind my audience, when do counties have to certify and when do you certify? Oh, I'll get those dates for you. But we have about a week going through that because we have to do the risk-limiting audit. That takes a while. So it will be a couple weeks out there. Blake, do you have the dates, county certification date? Can you repeat that for the mic? So the counties have to certify next Monday, and our certification is 17 days after tomorrow. Thank you. See you all tomorrow. Thank you, Secretary. Thank you, Randall. Thank you. Now the real important question, which sticker did you take? This one. Cool. Hey, Jonathan, did you see my text? Yeah, I didn't have it.