What caused delay in counting all votes for Macon primary election? Local official explains

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Total tallies for Bibb County primary voting results were not reported until late Wednesday morning after technical issues plagued local elections workers Tuesday night, according to Tom Gillon, the county’s supervisor of elections.

The Georgia secretary of state’s website, which reports live election results, stated 100% of the county’s results were reported early Wednesday morning. Gillon said that was inaccurate until just before 11:30 a.m., when the county was able to get all votes accounted for.

Five of seven tabulators which calculated early voting totals were still not confirmed by 9 a.m. Wednesday, Gillon told The Telegraph. This meant results from all three early voting locations – Macon Mall, Theron Ussery Park and the Elaine Lucas Senior Center – were not added to the total tallied votes until later in the morning.

The issue came down to memory cards.

“We had to scan some ballots that we were hoping to use a memory card for,” Gillon said. “We were able to print the results of all of them … but just the memory cards themselves weren’t uploading so we had to scan all the ballots from those tabulators, which took a while,” Gillon said.

Some advance early voting ballots were also re-scanned Tuesday night because the tabulators could not read the original versions. It was unclear why certain tabulators rejected some ballots.

“The state system is probably a bit behind but hopefully we’ll have those (ballots) uploaded very soon,” Gillon said.

He anticipated all votes from remaining tabulators would be finalized a couple hours after 9 a.m. Wednesday, and they were done shortly after.

The board has until Friday to calculate provisional ballots, ballots from overseas and some absentees, “but that can’t be a very large number,” Gillon said.

The secretary of state’s website says Bibb County results were updated just before 10 a.m. Wednesday, but it’s unclear how many votes are still unaccounted for in the state’s reported total, according to Gillon.