Georgia is rolling the dice on election confidence, literally. The state’s top elections office on Thursday launched a statewide procedural hand-count audit, sending county crews back to the tables to manually review randomly selected batches of ballots from recent primary runoffs.
Teams in all 159 counties are being told to pull specific batches tied to contested, top-of-the-ticket races and hand-tally the paper ballots inside. The goal is to check those human counts against machine tabulations and, at least in theory, calm nerves after a bruising and highly scrutinized primary season.
In a video shared by CBS News Atlanta, state officials are shown rolling handfuls of dice to generate a random seed number that software then uses to choose which ballot batches counties must count by hand. The Secretary of State’s office said the audit is centered on the recent Republican U.S. Senate and Democratic lieutenant governor runoff contests and will be conducted statewide.
How the hand-count audit works
The selection process follows a risk-limiting, audit-style approach. Staff roll multiple dice to create a long seed number, plug that into a software tool and let the program spit out which batches each county has to review. Local election teams then manually tally the voter-readable text on ballots in those batches and compare those numbers with the QR-code-based machine totals, looking for any serious mismatches.
Georgia officials have used this dice and seed system in past risk-limiting audits, according to GPB News.
Lawmakers and critics clash
The timing is no accident. The audit arrives just as state lawmakers voted this week to push back a July 1 deadline that would have barred QR-code tabulation and layered new hand-count rules into Georgia’s election laws, a move Democrats warned could fuel suspicion and bog down results, AP News reported.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has repeatedly argued that machine tabulation, paired with audits like this one, is accurate and efficient. At the same time, The Current has highlighted that hand-marked paper ballots have produced a disproportionate share of errors in past post-election checks, giving both sides of the voting-tech debate fresh talking points.
What to expect next
County election offices will post the hand-tally sheets from the selected batches, and the Secretary of State’s office will gather those numbers into a statewide report for public review, according to GPB News. Officials stress that this is a verification step, not an automatic recount that could overturn certified results, and say small, explainable gaps between human and machine counts are normal.
That will not stop people from poring over the paperwork. Party operatives and independent watchdogs are expected to scrutinize county-level tally sheets in the coming days for any discrepancies big enough to raise alarms.
Politically, the audit is likely to crank up the volume on Georgia’s ongoing fight over how ballots should be counted heading into November. Lawmakers chose to delay any sweeping overhaul of the QR-code tabulation system until 2028, AP News reported, which means the current setup will remain in place through the 2026 midterms, with audits like this one serving as the main reality check on the machines.
