The chief elections clerk in Floyd County, Georgia, was fired Thursday after he failed to tabulate 2,600 votes that were cast during in-person early voting at the county’s administration building, an error that was identified during a recount earlier this week.
According to The Rome News-Tribune, the Floyd County Board of Elections fired Robert Brady, the chief elections clerk, for his vote-counting failure.
An election board member, John Scott Husser, also accused Brady at the meeting of repeatedly failing to “meet performance objectives” for his position.
Brady was reportedly recently reprimanded for arguing with a member of the public. He also did not attend the meeting on Thursday because he is currently under quarantine, having been potentially exposed to the coronavirus last week.
Fox 5-Atlanta reports that Brady’s firing was a matter with bipartisan support, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had previously called on Brady to resign.
Earlier this week, Gabriel Sterling, voting system manager of Georgia, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the vote tallies were on a memory card that was never uploaded. The failure, he said, was the result of someone not doing “their job properly.”
A deep red area of north-west Georgia, Floyd County voted heavily for President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Of the 2,600 votes found on the memory card, 1,643 were for Trump and 865 were for Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Luke Martin, chairman of the Floyd County Republican Party, told AJC that the Floyd County error, when caught, fixed a previous discrepancy between the number of early voters in the county and the number of tabulated early-voting ballots in the county.
“It’s very concerning,” Martin told AJC. “But this doesn’t appear to be a widespread issue. I’m glad the audit revealed it, and it’s important that all votes are counted.”
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, three other counties — Douglas County, Fayette County, and Walton County — missed votes during the initial tabulation. These errors were also caught in the subsequent recount.
Election workers in three counties discovered a total of more than 3,300 new votes stored on memory cards that hadn’t been loaded into election computers….
Those votes are now being counted, reducing Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump to 12,781 votes. Trump gained about 1,400 votes that county election officials hadn’t tallied before the recount.
Fayette County voted for Trump over Biden by about a 6% margin in 2020, Douglas County voted overwhelmingly for Biden, and Walton County voted overwhelmingly for Trump. According to AJC, the missing Fayette County and Walton County votes broke for Trump, and the missing Douglas County votes broke for Biden.