Höga tjänstemän i Georgia ger en uppdatering om förtidsröstning | NTD NYHETER

with fellow friends in the industry so hopefully you'll forgive me then. But again grateful that you're all here today and again as you already know that Georgia voters are smashing through every voting record with more than 3 million for in-person early voting turnout which is unprecedented in Georgia history. As of Tuesday at 3.30 p.m. yesterday voter turnout surpassed the 3.2 million mark and 3 million early voting with 3 million 9,204 check-ins shattering the previous early voting performance. If you look back in time on day 16 for early voting in 2018 we had 1.3 million. 2020 we had 2.1 million. 2022 1.7 million. So that kind of gives you an idea of where we are today record turnout. This will be my team's second presidential election. We have overseen thousands of elections since 2018 with thousands of elected officials successfully and wonderfully accepting their own wins and tens of thousands of opponents gracefully conceding to those who have won. Kind of reminded me of what I saw last night. My grandson was playing in the playoff game, second round. In that second round of baseball playoffs all of a sudden that last inning all of a sudden went the other way and my grandson's team came up short. As soon as they came up short and they lost I know that they were disappointed but what they did because both teams were good sportsmen they lined up and they did that passing of shaking each other's hand and said congratulations. Good game. I know my son and my daughter-in-law they're proud to see that from their son. As a grandparent I'm proud to see that but just as an American I think that's wonderful because I think that's what America is. It's gracefully accepting your win but also gracefully accepting your losses. And I have no control over human behavior but what I do and what I will make sure and what I've had made sure since 2018 that I will hold both parties accountable to you the voters of Georgia and I stand ready to defend the results of the election with election officials all across the states. We will do our job. Georgia voters also know that we've made it easy to cast the ballot because I've been traveling the state and I've been watching early voting. In fact I early voted on day two. We know it's easy to cast the ballot and we know it's hard to cheat. It's really as simple as that. Over the last few years we have worked tirelessly to prepare for this election by adding early voting days and investing in infrastructure creating more security and more voter convenience but then you think only to be rewarded with the lies about Jim Crow 2.0 and we lost an all-star game. Frustratingly recently a candidate repeated that lie that will lock up people and give water to voters waiting in line to vote. That's a lie because we don't have any lines in Georgia. It's just cheap politics. Now there are some reports of voters waiting in line for more than 30 minutes at a few popular voting locations but during early voting you can vote in any of your county precincts that are open on early voting. On day two Trish and I we went to a North Fulton library. We looked at the line. It looked like a 30-minute line but actually I think it's probably a 20-minute line because we've done such a great job with our electronic poll pads of moving people through the lines. So what we did is we went to another library, voted in seven minutes and that's what you can do in and out the door and it's quick. So what we're seeing right now is statewide you have to wait for as much as three minutes to check in to vote. For me it was under a minute. No special treatment. That's what they're running through at that precinct but also that's what they're running through in Paulding where I was yesterday, Coeda and the day before in Jones County. People are moving through those lines very quickly and I'm just so proud of the work that our And nobody's getting put in jail. Nobody's getting arrested because there are no more lines. I made sure that one of the things that we put into state law was that lines on election day have to be shorter than one hour and we've also then just didn't put it into state law. We actually worked with the counties giving them some metrics. This is how many voters you have. This is how many voting machines you have and then you're gonna get you know graded on that green light, yellow light and also red light. We worked with the counties and the counties have done a great job. In 2022 the average wait time was two minutes. 2022 the fall of 2020 when we started monitoring this it was three minutes and we'll see what it is next week but we know that we'll come up making sure that lines stay under one hour. Yes there'll be maybe a few precincts that'll be 50 minutes at those little moments. That's really important because we think the voters always come first and the voter experience is really important. Everything that we have done for elections have been to improve ballot security, transparency, accuracy and trust and improve the voter experience for short lines and quick results. Simply put I have put voters first and that really matters to me. Their vote matters but so do they. But also when we do that we build confidence and by building confidence we build trust and trust is today's modern-day gold standard. We're battle-testing, we're ready and we're delivering a convenient voter experience despite everything that some people might say. I want to bring up here Blake Evans. He's gonna share some metrics here for you. We're gonna put on real TV which is our data not what you're gonna see on general TV. Go ahead Blake. Thank you Mr. Secretary. So first and foremost or first I want to echo what the Secretary said that we are extremely grateful for the hard work of county election officials in all 159 of our counties. They are doing just a tremendous job of processing voters in very high turnout that we're seeing this election and I'll show some numbers here in just a second. I was in Paulding a couple of days ago and they had several voters that were there in line in a time from the last voter to the time it took them in the back of the line to get to the front and it was under 15 minutes and that was during the lunch hour rush. So they're just doing a tremendous job, their co-workers are doing a tremendous job and as we get closer to election day I expect to see more of the same and we're just very very grateful for their hard work. And so now to get to some of the numbers that we have we have a I would call it state-of-the-art data hub that's on our website you can go there and it updates hourly throughout early voting and you get to see some turnout numbers. Just to show some other graphics here's a chart that we have internally that shows that just under 3.1 million people have voted advance in person in all 159 of our counties and so each color on the on the chart represents a different county. We monitor that throughout throughout early voting. We have a little line graph here that shows just we've seen the steady turnout throughout advance in person voting. The first week was extremely busy we saw a little bit of a of a decrease in the second week although still high numbers and I expect as we get into today tomorrow and Friday that we're going to see those numbers go up again. Typically what we see in advance in person voting is that the last day of voting ends up being very very high as people try to get their vote cast before election day. And so right now we are trending right up towards 3.1 million people having voted advance in person. This right here is a screenshot of our data hub which you can go online and and take a look at. This particular screenshot shows absentee voting statistics and we have a lot of great data here that people can really drill down into. They can drill down into the county level and they can look at how many ballots have been requested by voters in that county, how many have been accepted, how many have maybe been canceled because we do have voters who will cancel their ballot for example to show up and vote in person we have that data here. And so through our data hub you can drill down and look into this. When I took this screenshot we were sitting at just under 200,000 absentee ballots accepted and that was out of 341,520 that have been issued as of about an hour ago. And so again we update these numbers hourly and so we'll be doing that up until election day. On election day we will not be updating the data hub hourly with election day turnout and that's simply because we have about over 2,200 election day polling locations across the state and we get turnout numbers for most of them but but not all of them. And so but during advance voting we do update this hourly. And then we also have this on our data hub this is showing total turnout of all 159 counties in our state. At the time that I took this we were sitting at 45.4 percent turnout that's just under 3.3 million people having voted in our state. And you can also drill down you can see which counties in the state are leading the turnout and Towns County was sitting at about 64 percent turnout which is very very high going into was still two days left two and a half days left of early voting. And you can see which counties are leading in turnout all the way down to from 1 to 159. And so I wanted to share those with you again I encourage you to go to our data hub. Just a few other things that I want to say real fast is we are very thankful I mentioned for our county election officials we're also very grateful for our Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency. They've been tremendously helpful to us throughout the process of early voting and preparing for election day especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. They have helped us with even deploying star links and making sure that we have those if the county loses communications. We had one county that lost communications at their main office as we deployed a star link out to them and they were able to continue processing their absentee ballot applications and voter registration applications. We're very grateful there. Also very grateful for Georgia Power as they have been helpful in the locations where we need a power restored they make sure the power got restored and also as we gear up for election day they have been helpful in making sure there's not construction going on near polling locations. There's not work that they're doing going on near polling locations and so we're grateful for that. And so with that I do want to turn it right now over to our Chief Operations Officer Gabriel Sterling. Absolutely Blake Evans Always being helpful. Blake covered most of this. Obviously record turnout is fantastic and we are very thankful to the counties and their workers. We have to acknowledge we're working in an environment that is very different than it was eight, ten, six years ago. It's an environment that is highly stressful but they know what they're doing and they know their jobs and these are all American heroes and the Secretary and Blake and I get to get up here all TV cameras and everything but we always have to keep in mind is the county local elections officials who are running this election. And on the data hub we made a decision to invest in that years ago to help to kill misinformation and disinformation. The idea of ballot dumps. The idea that we don't know how many votes are coming in because on Friday you can look on the data hub and we close down and will be some reconciliations where they make sure they get all the cards in and all the check-ins lined up. We will know the amount of people who voted early and also by Monday afternoon and even Tuesday day we will know how many absentee ballots have been received. One big thing on absentee ballots we still have like 140,000 that are out that could come in. As we have been saying now for a month if you haven't gotten your absentee ballot yet make a plan to go vote in person either early in your county or on election day. If you have gotten your absentee ballot us and the United States Postal Service now say do not put it in the mail. Take it to your local county elections office or the drop box at the early voting location in your county. That way you're protecting your vote. If you have mailed it sign up for ballot scout on your my voter page at mvp.sos.ga.gov and see if make sure it's been accepted. If it hasn't been accepted by Thursday night make a plan to go vote at your local early voting location or go to your regular election day location. All that information is on the MVP page so it's very convenient for you to go to. As the Secretary and Blake said we are here for the voters of Georgia and they are showing up and showing out I guess is what they like to say. We are at two thirds of the entire turnout we saw in the 2020 election already. There is a possibility it could be a ghost town on election day. We could see less we had a less than a million show up in 2020 during COVID with all the uses of these free election day voting and we like Secretary said we can't know voter behavior or human behavior. We may break four million we may not. This is what we do know. When you go to vote it'll be an easy process and there are those who are already going out of the way trying to undermine people's thoughts on how these processes work. Another thing on data hub there are people in the Twitterverse basically saying the active voter numbers are going up after the registration date is closed. In the very first press conference we had for this general election we said the active voter number will continue to rise. That is for two reasons. One registrations that were received before the cutoff date hadn't been processed yet and two every time an inactive voter votes they become what active. So we're being transparent and I love some of the things on Twitter they'll take pictures like it's going up. It's like if we were gonna do something secretive why would we tell you? We're giving you all the information in the world and we're explaining it to you and for those who choose not to understand and it is a choice. People are making a choice not to believe. Those of us who are in the government offices and I get it sometimes you should be skeptical. You can ask questions and those can be legitimate but some of these things are so cuckoo-kachoo crazy town that it's ridiculous to even try to respond to sometimes. So with that I'll take any questions y'all and I have on this big turnout and everything else. We'll start Mark why not? Well first of all the law now states that all the early votes generally processing those because they're processed on-site. They are voted and they're put onto those cards and they're tabulated back at the EMS at the headquarters. Those will all be uploaded to the election night reporting system and made public but one hour after the polls close. I know we with some people been saying 8 o'clock. The law specifically says an hour after the polls close because let's say that you know Gus the the night watchman overslept and forgot to bring the key in and they open up a 720 and a court orders them to stay open until the following 720 that night. For that county it will be 820 for the upload. So there is that possibility so the vast majority will be up by 8. Also any processed absentees as you pointed out will also be loaded at that point. Depending on the county, depending on the volume, there'll be many people who it could be coming in on that Tuesday if it came in the mail and that's not gonna process till that night or probably the next morning potentially depending on what happens that day. The other thing we will know is by midnight we will know the volume the outer edges of who's voted and to go back to something happened in 2020, UOCAVA was this bucket of votes that everybody thought might change the outcome. We've gotten 20 I'm gonna spitball these numbers you want specifics you can call Blake in our office and get the specifics. It's around 23,000 or so UOCAVA requests and I think about almost 10,000 have been returned. Is that about right? About 10,000 in return. What happens is not all of them make it back. And I remember very specifically standing here and they said well how many are in the mail? I'm like I can't know that. I can tell you this at the time it was more than zero but less than 8,000. We'll have a similar situation this time depending on how many come in over the next few days. Because those by law if they're postmarked by Tuesday have to be accepted by Friday. And I'm gonna go over this again the other two buckets of votes that can be there from Tuesday to Friday are the provisional vote votes that can be verified and then also the absentee ballots that can be cured. And a cure is you forgot to sign it. You forgot to put your driver's license number on it. You transposed your driver's license number. The county has to notify you and let you know hey you need to come in here and fix this so they can protect your franchise. So again it's another reason to go through and check on the my voter page to make sure that your mail ballot don't think it's done. It's the responsibility of the voter to go make sure that that has been accepted by the county so it can be counted in the final tabulation. Who else? Yes. Frayer. No it's we've already talked to the governor's office about lining up special assistant attorney generals because frankly a we don't know who's going to win and who wins will decide who sues us essentially at the end of the day. So if Vice President Harris wins we expect Trump officials to sue us. If President Trump wins we expect Harris officials to sue us. And again if you're getting sued by both sides generally speaking we feel like we're doing a pretty good job. But that we're lining up we're already kind of knowing what the basis and we're seeing some of the things are kind of claiming from our previous lawsuits in the Friendly Foundation. I don't get too deep into our general counsel standing over there itching right now I can tell. Archer. They don't like it when we comment on that Archer. But I will say this. Obviously the threat environment is different now but I think our counters are more prepared. Our local law enforcement are more prepared. State law enforcement is more prepared. Our office is more prepared. We have deployed tools into the counties that have opted in with the poll worker first response text tool that will allow a poll manager to text a number that will notify the county elections director, our state office, the war room and local law enforcement if they have opted in as to what a situation on the ground might be. That is an investment we've done. Fortunately so far no one's had to do that. We do get reports of people planning potential physical issues on machines themselves and we are in regular communication with the GBI and the FBI about potential threats and I don't want to get too deep into it at that point because when you say hey we're ready for anything people say hold my beer. You know it's just gonna see what happens next. So we are more prepared. The environment we obviously know is different and people's guards up and the problem is sometimes your guards really up everything looks like a threat even normal things like somebody you find a dead squirrel on your porch did somebody put that there as an intimidation factor or did the cat kill the squirrel? We don't know but everybody's and another thing that our office did is we had seven different convenings with local law enforcement and local elections officials so they could kind of game plan and go through what they would do in these situations and not have the first time they meet me in a high-stress difficult situation. I cannot tell you how many tabletops we have done with our federal partners and state partners to game plan pre-election issues, election day issues, and even post-election issues. You can't prepare for everything. It's impossible and it will always be new ways to undermine people's faith in the outcomes of these elections but we know we've done all we can with the resources the legislature has given us. SB 202, SB 189 have been helpful to in many ways to help run better, stronger, safer elections in the state. Yes sir. A mathematical assumption is yes because as an overall percentage but we can go back and look at that specifically but I'm gonna make an assumption that it likely is. Yes ma'am. That is a local county decision and in some locations we have to understand historically if a cop car is sitting in front of the polling location some people might feel intimidated. So we're not going to direct anybody to do those kind of things even though under the Constitution the sheriff's office is supposed to be supplying security for all elections locations but we leave that up to the local elections officials to decide the best way to do that to deploy you know maybe a plainclothes person which we know they're doing in some places to avoid those kind of issues. Yes. I'm sure we have but I'll have to look into it I mean if we always have claims and stuff and some we triage out as being not supported by any rational evidence but I think we have opened up we've opened up a handful yeah but not not a ton but we can get you those basic numbers. Nobody in the middle come on don't get hammered guys. All right. Yes. Well I mean you obviously are going right into this nice high hard one over the plate that I can easily knock out of the park we had a DDoS attack only last a couple of weeks ago September 14th and our IT team which we've really kind of improved and upgraded over the last couple of years and our partners with Cloudflare at 516 on that day we saw a slowdown on the absentee ballot portal and by 520 our partner had labeled it a DDoS attack and recognized IP addresses used by other and other attacks and we were able to mitigate it and so within 20 minutes the attack essentially ended we monitored it for the rest of the evening until 10 p.m. that night then they cleared it over and went back to regular configuration. We didn't really want to talk about that too much but our friends at CNN got it so we had to get it out there because we want to talk about it after the election because again it goes back to my hold my beer scenario where we say hey everything's great and everything's safe that somebody's gonna try to hit you so we went we weren't trying to brag about it but we feel really proud of the way our team responded to that and we again don't know the good thing I want to say about this let's remind everybody voting machines remember this voting machines are never connected to the Internet let me be clear about that voting machines the scanners the election management systems the ballot marking devices are never on the Internet so they can't be hacked remotely understand that that is a long time lie and misinformation disinformation and I feel like I have to be whack-a-mole up here on that every couple of years just to remind everybody but they are never connected to the Internet all right what else Kate nothing maybe we answered every one of your questions oh here we go sorry well everything going to plan would be every voter gets to cast a vote all the battalions come in the one thing we can't control with the margins we can't control that so if the margins 50,000 this that everybody will easily be able to make the call because the official results don't come out until we certify the election but the networks will make the call if it's I saw this one terrifying tweet from from a political group that had all the states with like the margins they thought they were gonna have based on who turned out what the polls say and had Georgia plus or minus 1,000 I didn't sleep that night very well because it could be that this is a tight election and I want to make sure that all the Harris supporters and all the Trump supporters who can't possibly imagine the person that they hate winning it might happen it might happen this is a tight election anybody telling you it's gonna be a blowout one with the other has some secret magic ball the rest of us don't know about it's going to be a close election here it's going to be a close election in Pennsylvania it's gonna be a close election in Michigan and in Wisconsin and in Nevada and Arizona and North Carolina and guess what that's what they all where are all the presidential candidates since last week here North Carolina Michigan Pennsylvania Wisconsin Arizona Nevada because we know what's gonna happen every other state the best thing for us and we say this election administrators is we want a high turnout we want a wide margin I think we're getting the high turnout taken care of we will probably we could potentially have a record turnout of active voters in this state 2020 was the highest since since Jack Kennedy was elected in 1960 and as we know the voting base there was a lot smaller because that was pre Voting Rights Act so the voting population now is gigantic compared to that we're gonna have a record turnout more than likely but we can't know what the margins moving and that's that's going to be determinative of when we know people like in 2020 guess what get a great election day everything went fantastic there were no lines we loved it it was great same thing can happen this time we're gonna have a great election day it's all be determinative on the actual outcomes anybody else all right thank y'all and we'll see you probably if not before Tuesday we'll see you Tuesday