Gabriel Sterling, the statewide voting systems implementation manager in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, said Tuesday afternoon that the counties have passed the 5 million vote count threshold for the physical hand tallying and only 21 counties are still working on the data entry part of the audit.
Of those 21 counties, six have single-digit deviations from their original results, so Sterling said it was possible that the counties just haven’t hit the “finalize results” button in the audit system, but are basically done.
Since the morning press conference, no other counties have discovered a batch of uncounted ballots, but Sterling said that it “doesn’t mean it can’t happen between now and midnight tonight.”
But absent that happening, according to Sterling, Biden still leads by 12,781 votes.
At the end of this press conference, Sterling said that he hopes that when this is through everyone — regardless of party affiliation — will “have faith in the outcome.”
“I’m prayerful that we can get through this, and that we can find a way to have everybody at the end of the day — Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, independent, socialist, whatever — have faith in the outcome of the election regardless of how it came out,” he said.
Sterling said that the goal is to release the results of the audit by noon Thursday. The state plans to upload all the audit results on a website.
