Election Night ‘good busy’ at Elections office

ALBANY — Dougherty County Elections Supervisor Ginger Nickerson said working at the Elections office was both “extremely busy” and “good busy” on Election Day.

During the last governor’s race in 2014, 50,484 people, 47.62 percent of registered voters at the time, show up at the polls in the county. This year, 57,817 people, 52.35 percent of voters, took part in the governor’s election. Nickerson added there were approximately 11,000 early votes this year.

Nickerson said Elections office workers counted totals on Election Day and throughout the night from the early voting period, absentee ballots received by mail and votes from all 28 precincts. Nickerson estimated the employees counted around 2,000 votes across the precincts Tuesday night.

“We’re not overwhelmed by the work because that’s what we’re here for,” the Elections supervisor said. “We’re just glad that people are excited and taking part in the process. We have a tendency where we watch (votes) skip generations. This generation will vote, and this generation will not. So it’s a good thing when you can see all different generations come out collectively and cast their ballots. That’s a really good thing.”

Nickerson said early voting turnout was “a lot bigger” this year with around 11,000 early votes and approximately 3,000 absentee ballots.

“We started off our first day of advance voting in that office with, I think, 124 (votes) and we didn’t see that number anymore,” Nickerson said. “We went from 124 to 400 to 500 to 600, 700. We had an 800 day; we had a 900 day. In the last week, of course, we had two locations, and they were doing three digits as well.”

As of now, the only outstanding votes from the election are from provisional ballots. Voters may have to use provisional ballots for a variety of reasons, such as not having a photo ID when attempting to vote, their name not being on registration lists or for their name having a different spelling than their registration. People are typically given until Friday to present identification.

Nickerson said how long it’ll take to count provisional ballots depends on how many they find to be acceptable.

“They are paper ballots, so we have to run them through the scanner to get the tally of votes,” Nickerson said. “Once we finish, the memory card is in an optical scan unit, and then we connect that optical scan unit to the server, so it uploads the results to the rest of our results.”

Nickerson explained that afterward, the local Elections Board will determine the official and complete results at an open meeting, the results of which will be posted on the Secretary of State’s website. The board’s meeting will take place at 5 p.m. Friday in Room 120 at the Government Center.

“It was a lot (to count), but we didn’t have any issues,” Nickerson said. “It was a lot for our equipment to take on, but it took it on, and it worked. So we’re looking forward to Friday to see what the official results are going to be; we’re looking forward to seeing them all over the state.”

The Government Center is located at 222 Pine Ave.

File Photo