Cobb elections audit of Smyrna council race falls two votes short of initial count

MARIETTA — A hand count by Cobb elections officials Friday ended in a vote tally that fell just short of the tally counted on election night.

In the race for the open Smyrna City Council Ward 2 seat, Latonia Hines squeaked out a victory over Natalie Keng in Tuesday’s runoff. While the initial tally from Election Day gave Hines 203 votes to Keng’s 188, the audit conducted Friday tallied 201 votes for Hines, while the count for Keng remained 188.

Cobb Elections Director Janine Eveler believes the undercount of two Hines votes was caused by staff not pulling all of the ballots for the audit. There is no indication that the ballot scanners themselves malfunctioned, she said.

While Election Day ballots for a precinct are kept in a batch together, early in-person ballots are mixed together with thousands of other early ballots cast by people registered in different precincts. The same is true of absentee ballots.

“Today, we didn’t have all the ballots,” Eveler said. “When you’re pulling the ballots from the absentee mail or the early voting, you’re going through the whole batch of several thousand ballots to find all of the ballots, and the staff thought that they had gotten all of the ballots out of the stack, but apparently there are two missing.”

“We did verify that we had the right result from the ballots that we had, and the winner is Ms. Hines,” Eveler added.

In addition to the 201 Hines votes and 188 Keng votes counted in the audit, staff counted two ballots where voters left the race blank, matching election night results.

The audit, which is intended to verify the choice marked on electronically scanned ballots by hand-counting them, was not requested by either candidate in the race. Instead, explained Eveler, the county elections office wanted to demonstrate that ballot scanners are working as they should. Eveler plans to continue conducting audits in future elections.

“We picked a small race this time, but it was also a very close race, so that we could show that the tabulation is correct,” Eveler said.

Eveler confirmed that there were no irregularities with the election for the open seat on the Smyrna City Council, and that the audit was planned before the race was decided.

Pat Gartland, the Republican Party appointee on the Cobb Board of Elections, observed the audit.

“I come just to check it out,” said Gartland. “Janine [Eveler] does a phenomenal job and it’s just for transparency. Sometimes we have people here, and so we want to have someone from the election board besides our staff here.”