Technical issue delays absentee ballot counting in 2nd largest county in Ga.
Gwinnett County is experiencing a technical issue that is delaying the counting of absentee ballots, county communications director Joe Sorenson told ABC News.
The county had processed the over 118,000 absentee ballots it received that were ready to be pushed through the system to be counted Tuesday night, but "when the time came to push them, the software system (held) a little more than half of the ballots for adjudication," Sorenson said.
Adjudication means the ballots need to be reviewed by a human being and reentered.
According to Gowri Ramachandran, an election security expert at the Brennan Center, ballots are loaded into voting machines in large batches. When the machines determine that one ballot in the batch requires additional human review, it may flag the entire batch of ballots as requiring additional review. Poll workers would then need to go through the batch to determine which ballots needed to be reviewed to determine voter intent. There were 3,200 batches of mail-in ballots that received the error.
The county told ABC News it does not know how many ballots have been affected.
Sorenson said the county is determined to count these ballots overnight.
"We're gonna stay as long as it takes, up to a certain point," Sorenson said.
He said no determination has yet to be made about when to stop trying.
Gwinnett, the second most populated county in the state, is a key former Republican stronghold in the Atlanta suburbs that has been trending Democratic. In 2016, it went for Hillary Clinton by 5.8 points, but it was the first time it voted for the Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, when Georgia native Jimmy Carter won every one of the state's 159 counties. In 2018, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams won the county again -- and by a bigger margin taking Gwinnett by 14.4 points.
-ABC News' John Santucci
