Georgia plans to use technology to check presidential vote totals

ATLANTA — Georgia election officials say they’ve overcome obstacles to a planned double-check of this November’s vote count, which will upload images of every ballot and then scan them with text-recognition software.

The auditing proposal had been on hold because a company had protested after it didn’t win the state’s contract, which came with a $5 million maximum budget.

But the state government rejected the protest and awarded the contract to Enhanced Voting, which told the state it could do the audit for $1.5 million this year, compared with a $4.6 million bid by its competitor, Clear Ballot.

“We’re moving full speed ahead with training and preparations for the upcoming audit in November,” said Mike Coan, executive director for the State Election Board. “It will help ensure confidence in the outcomes.”

The ballot-scan audit is scheduled to be completed Nov. 21, the day before statewide certification of the presidential election. State legislators required the audit under a law passed this year, House Bill 974.

The new auditing technology is an attempt to verify the accuracy of results reported by Dominion Voting Systems ballot scanners, which read votes from QR codes.

Election officials will load ballot images — pictures of each ballot — and then computers will use optical character recognition software to read the text of voters’ choices on each ballot, count them and identify discrepancies.

The digital audit will supplement the state’s existing hand-count audit of a statistical sample of ballots.

Clear Ballot had protested the contract award, saying it was more qualified and used patented audit technology similar to Enhanced Voting’s software.

After the state Department of Administrative Services denied the protest, Clear Ballot notified the state it wouldn’t pursue an appeal in court.

“Clear Ballot has always acted with Georgia’s best interests in mind, as we fully understand the importance of having an accurate and transparent election,” CEO Bob Hoyt wrote in a letter to the state Aug. 28.