Raffensperger says 4.1 million Georgians cast ballots

The Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, giving a briefing. Let's listen in. The Press Thank you, sir. What it shows is that they trust the system and they trust the results. And that's because of the great work of Governor Kemp and myself, who made it easy to vote and hard to cheat. Today, Georgia is the gold standard for election administration and is a model for the nation. We started preparing for this election months, if not years ago. From instituting citizenship checks, working to provide the cleanest, Voter rolls in the entire nation. We have worked hard for that trust. Approximately 4.1 million Georgian voters have turned out for this election. Today we see approximately 1.3 million have come out. We'll have final numbers at some point shortly. We've seen that Georgians turn out in record numbers during early voting. Lines were short, voting was smooth, and now we await the results. What I do want to do is I want to thank the 159 hardworking election directors, their staff, their poll workers, thousands of poll workers. And most importantly, I want to thank the voters. Thank you for turning up, coming out to vote. I do have to give credit to two counties because it's become a contest, because they are all supposed to report their early vote results by 8 p.m. Floyd, again, was the first county to report the early votes, followed by Polk. Now there's Aiken and Noah Beck. So that's a husband and wife duo. Once again, they lead the pack. But this is a testament to the professionalism of county election officials, the Secretary of State's election division, and everyone else who made this election a success for the voters. But while I'm up here today, I do want to just recognize a couple people on our team. One, Blake Evans was up here at 5 o'clock, so you got to, you know, spend some time with him. And he's downstairs, and he otherwise would be up here, but he's got some work to do. And that's the ticking of the time, making sure it all gets buttoned up appropriately. But also, Charlene, if you come on out here, our general counsel, I would like to introduce Charlene, because she's like the legal, you know, beagle of our office. And Charlene... I joined our office second term, came from the Attorney General's office, and she used to be the Attorney General's representative for the State Election Board, and that's how I got to know her. Outstanding lawyer, outstanding attorney, actually has done some prosecuting, actually now I've been with the Attorney General's office, Assistant Attorney General, and now our General Counsel for the last four years, and just has done a tremendous job. Thank you, John. We have never lost a lawsuit during my term in office, but a lot of that goes not just to Brad, because Brad's just an engineer, he's not a lawyer. It goes to our great legal staff, and so I just wanted to acknowledge the tremendous work that Charlene McGowan has done for this office and for the people of Georgia. Thank you, Charlene. I also want to recognize our Deputy Secretary of State, Jordan Fuchs. She can come out here. Because, you know, Trish and I have known Jordan for many years now, actually going back to my state house run, and then obviously my runs for Secretary of State, and earlier this year, my other race. But she is just an incredible, tireless worker. And she's pulled this together. We have a great team. And a lot of that is due to her work. And really, you know, looking out for the pitfalls and making sure that we always, you know, are sensitive to what we need to do, to what do we need to tweak, just so we kind of hit, you know, the right buttons and the right tone as we're out there, because we understand how sensitive the whole topic of elections has become. But I'm just really grateful for everything you've done, Jordan. I believe that we have the best team in the entire country. There's no one that really compares to us. Because if you look at some of the battles and some of the uphill challenges we've had to face, we did it together. We built the team. It's strong. It's resilient. And it produces trust in elections. So thank you. So that, folks, if you have any questions, we'll be back here in a minute. We'll probably, another hour and a half, two hours, we'll have some more information. It's almost quarter to eight, so by nine o'clock, we'll have a better idea. And then, you know, by 11, we'll have even more data points. Most of the counties, you know, are uploading. Fulton has uploaded their early votes, by the way. So that's good because there's a lot of folks that have voted in Fulton County. So you're seeing, you know, small counties, big counties, everyone's, you know, kind of following, making sure they follow the law. And it really builds trust and confidence. Do we have any questions in the meantime? Yeah, we saw Fulton and Gwinnett do this almost an hour before the deadline, which is great. Give us a rundown of what we're going to expect tonight as we hit that 8 p.m. deadline, and then what's next, and what happens tomorrow even. How are we going to watch this play out with the voting and then with auditing? What happens tonight is we continue by by state law all early results are supposed to be reported and then all accepted absentee ballots. Those are the ones received last week and over the weekend they're you know accepting those and making sure that those are lawful you know and eligible absentee ballots. That all gets uploaded by state law before 8 p.m. Sometimes counties not all of them hit it but it'll be such big numbers because of the amount of Folks we had for early voting. But that will continue to come in. And then whatever happened today, as counties finish up at their precinct and they report that up to headquarters after all the precincts are closed and they're done, then they'll start giving us that information county by county. Just because the law of numbers, the smaller counties, are going to be done that 100% first, that's the way it is. But it'll just give you a sense of where this is going, but also just a continued trust in the process. And if we do have a really close race, when are you going to start providing information about the audits and the re-scanning? As it relates to the audits, what we are right now in state law, we are going to be doing 20 risk-limiting audits. That's 14 congressional races, all of the congressional races, and six state-wides. Five of those statewides have already been set in state law, and then the other one is a randomized draw to pick that final statewide race that will be a risk-limiting audit. And the way a risk-limiting audit works, the closer it is... The more ballots you pull, and the ballots you pull, that's all based on randomized. The press will be invited to that process. Both political parties will be invited to that. Outside groups can come and watch the process as we start that. So it's a scientific, mathematical way of just verifying the accuracy of the count, the accuracy of the equipment. And so that's that first part. But also, when you were out there, you know, all of you, I assume you all voted, and that's a good thing. And so when you voted and you had your paper ballot, as it's going through the scanner, they're recording who you voted for, and that is now, we're pressing the tabulation button. But it's recorded a scanned copy of that. And so there's over 4 million scanned copies. Every single ballot has been scanned. We then look at those scans and we just run them through again and we read every single one. Who did you vote for? And it'll be the name on the ballot, not the barcode, not the QR code, but actually who did you vote for? And we actually don't just do the top of the ticket. We do every single race. We're going to take it right down. County Commissioner, State House, State Senator, and... Down in Glenn County, they even vote for the Water and Sewer Board, and that one will also be part of the audit. And then Fulton County has a county librarian that's actually in an elected position, a county surveyor in many of these counties. So every single race will be audited that way. And then if anything is within half percent, then we can do or expand that, and that would probably be 100 percent, you know, recount, hand recount of that race, just to verify the accuracy, because we think that's really important. That's how you build trust. We build trust by keeping those lines shorter than one hour. We build trust when we have quick results. We build trust when we verify citizenship, not once, not twice, but three times we've done that. And we build trust when we have then the Department of Audits, an outside state agency, tell you, the voters, that our voter list is 99.9% clean. It's 99.9% accurate. That's the highest in the nation. I don't think you can do much better than that, but the next Secretary of State can try. And good luck, because that's what we pride ourselves on, having a great system, but it all, once again, it gets back to your team. Because corporations can rise or fall on leadership, but part of that leadership is building a team. That's what I did in the business world. That's what we were committed to do as Secretary of State. And that's what we were really committed to do with our counties, that yes, we'll have accountability, but we want you to be stronger. And so I'm grateful for the county work. I'm grateful for Gavriel, which is the Election Officials Association for the state of Georgia. They've come together. We've all worked on training, training, and training again. And you're seeing the results today. So thank you very much. We'll be back shortly. Yes, sir. Secretary Raffensperger, you told us throughout the day that things were smooth and you explained what the minor issues were. Did anything significant happen that is noteworthy within the last couple hours before polls closed? Fulton County had one little issue and our investigators were just making sure that, does that mean that it kept that poll open a little bit longer or someone just couldn't find the entrance and exit? But other than that, it was really just Relatively a very smooth day, and that's why I've commended the counties for doing excellent, outstanding work. What was the Fulton County issue? Well, I think it was Fulton County. It was just they said that there was a situation, they thought the door was locked, and so our investigators went out just to take a look at it. So just briefly, so it was, there was a car accident in front of a high school, so they said that they weren't able to get into the entrance, and so we were trying, our investigators were there to see if it... Impeded. Yes. Impeded voting. OK. We've heard you say the days of, you know, staying up until 2, 3 in the morning are over. You know, how are you feeling right now about results coming in at a relatively decent time, and what are some of the factors today that might, you know, play into things finishing at a good time, if you think they might? I think we're on track. Be done by 12 midnight. I'm going to stick to my guns on that. And the counties better hope they do because I'll be talking to them otherwise. Yeah, it was. Thank you all. Talk to you later.