ATLANTA — Georgia is upping the number of risk-limiting audits of election results from two to a nation-leading 20.
[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]
Channel 2 investigative reporter Mark Winne spoke exclusively with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
“I’m sending this message to my fellow Georgians and every American that in Georgia, we have free, fair, fast, we have accessible and secure elections,” Raffensperger said. “And then we audit the fool out of it to show you that those machines are accurate, the vote count is accurate, and the winner won. And that’s our job.”
Raffensperger says Georgians can count on risk limiting audits to double-check the vote count and to make sure every vote counts, but only once.
And while his office did one risk-limiting audit each statewide election between 2020 and 2025 and two for the may primaries this year, there will be 20 for the general election in November.
“You’ll verify the accuracy of the machines but also the accuracy of the count,” he said.
RELATED STORIES:
- AJC/UGA poll: Jon Ossoff leads Mike Collins among likely voters in U.S. Senate race
- Poll shows virtual tie in Georgia governor’s race
- AJC/UGA poll: 55% of Georgians disapprove of the job President Trump is doing
Raffensberger says because of a law the Georgia General Assembly passed earlier this year, there will be audits of the races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state and U.S. senate, as well as all 14 of Georgia’s congressional seats plus one more randomly selected state office.
“Could be the public service commission or one of the other constitutional officers like labor commissioner or insurance commissioner. They’ll be drawing that out of the hat,” Raffensperger said.
“We’re the first state in the country to do more than two risk-limiting audits, and we’re doing 20,” Evans said.
Blake Evans, Georgia’s elections director, says in 2020 the risk-limiting audit looked at the presidential election, in 2022 at the secretary of state contest plus U.S. senate race, In 2024 president again, in 2025 the PSC, in May the Republican U.S. senate primary and the Democratic primary for governor.
“Basically what we got on the screen here, so this is from May, this is ARLO. This is the software that we use for the risk-limiting audits,” said elections division audit manager Bradley Myers.
He says county elections folks will upload data into the ARLO software, which will randomly select what batch of ballots to hand count to compare to the machine count.
Raffensperger says as a triple-check, there will be a retally of the scanned images of paper ballots for every race.
[SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
©2026 Cox Media Group
