Documents show that the votes tallied on a specific voting machine at the Winterville Train Depot outside of Athens, Georgia, were so aberrant that the odds of the discrepancy were described by a statistician in court documents as occurring in “less than one in one million” scenarios, according to a report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The voting station at Winterville, which is located in the home precinct of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, housed seven voting machines in total. Democrats won every race on six of those machines, but on machine no. 3 — the machine at the center of the controversial voting irregularity — the results were the opposite, with Republicans winning every race. According to the statistician’s analysis, the less-than-one-in-a-million irregularity would disappear if the results from the machine were reversed.
The oddity of Winterville’s “machine no. 3” only adds to the ongoing controversy regarding Georgia’s 2018 election, which already saw a suspiciously steep drop-off in votes recorded for the lieutenant governor’s race. According to the report, the lieutenant governor’s race, which was listed second on the voting ballot, received at least 80,000 fewer total votes than every other election in the state, including minor contests for positions such as insurance and labor commissioners. Additionally, the decrease in votes for the lieutenant governor’s race was evidenced in roughly two-thirds of the state’s electronic voting machines, but the paper absentee ballots showed no such discrepancy.
The latest abnormalities were discovered by the Journal-Constitution after the news outlet obtained over 15,000 pages of documentation relating to the 2018 election.
Charlotte Sosebee, the elections director for Athens-Clarke County, told the news outlet that she hadn’t previously heard about the voting irregularity with Winterville’s machine no. 3, but said the new reports didn’t raise any red flags from her perspective.
“I’ve never heard of a flipped vote under direct-recording electronic machines,” Sosebee said. “As for one candidate or one party getting more votes than another on the machines, that’s not something that we track or is considered a red flag.”
Eddie Perez of the Open Source Election Technology Institute, however, pushed back on state officials who rebuffed the voting discrepancy, saying Georgia should check to make sure that each race was coded correctly on the electronic machines.
“I don’t know why the state of Georgia appears to be resisting an examination,” Perez said. “They’re not getting any closer to the truth. This really is unusual, and it begs explanation.”
[image via YouTube screengrab]
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