Georgia House Race Flips After Hundreds of Votes Go Unreported, Sparking Investigation
Democrat Harry James had a 58-vote lead over Republican incumbent Gerald Greene in Georgia House District 154. Then Seminole County uploaded several hundred Election Day votes that hadn’t made it into the first tally. Greene moved ahead, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger opened an investigation into the delay.
Start with the check-ins. Seminole County had records of roughly 388 more people signing in to vote on Election Day than it had ballots in its reported count. State officials saw the gap during their review and notified the county. That sent local officials back through their results, where they found that the results from one memory card hadn’t been included in the reported totals.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R-GA) said the state’s checks worked as intended. Now his office wants to see what the county did before it put out the first tally.
“Georgia’s election safeguards are designed to identify discrepancies, and that is exactly what these guardrails did. Our office identified a significant discrepancy, alerted county officials, and uncovered a failure to properly upload election results. This oversight didn’t just affect the numbers – it changed who was leading an election. That is unacceptable, and we intend to find out exactly how it happened.”
On Sunday, Seminole County Elections Supervisor Ron Foskey disputed a missing-card claim made in a Facebook post by an account called “Donald Trump for President.” Foskey said no card was missing and that the Election Management System hadn’t finished the final step for the last precinct’s memory card. The county finished that step when officials met Friday.
“The EMS’s program did indeed show that the last step to validate and publish the results were not completed.”
Was the card ever missing? That’s how the AJC described it. Other reports said it was discovered or found. The county says it had every card on election night and that the report it put out was incomplete. Seminole County Elections Supervisor Ron Foskey said the scanner tape and the data on the cards both matched the number of ballots cast.
On Friday, Raffensperger’s office said Gerald Greene had gone from trailing by “less than 100” votes to leading by 262. The AJC reported the same lead. By Saturday, the state website showed 10,193 votes for Gerald Greene and 9,932 for Harry James. Subtract those, and you get 261, one vote shy of the figure in Friday’s release.
Republican state Rep. Gerald Greene said he was “in disbelief” and hoped his lead would hold. If he keeps his seat, Democrats would still control the 180-member Georgia House, but with 92 seats, they’d have just one more than they need for a majority.
Republicans were in court over a separate county election dispute in June. The RNC and the Georgia Republican Party sued election officials in Fulton and Gwinnett counties, arguing the counties had accepted absentee ballots through methods Georgia law didn’t allow.
Seminole County has until Monday to clarify and certify its results. By then, the votes will be in the tally, but voters still deserve an answer about the first report. If the county had the card all along, as Seminole County Elections Supervisor Ron Foskey says, how did the county put out numbers that left those votes off?
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