Seminole County

A memory card that never got uploaded in Seminole County changed who was ahead in a Georgia House race. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Friday that is unacceptable, and his office opened an investigation.

The race is House District 154. Republican incumbent Gerald Greene of Cuthbert against Democrat Harry James. The district touches nine counties in the southwest corner of the state, and Seminole is one of them. Election night’s unofficial tally had Greene trailing. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein put the deficit at 58 votes. Capitol Beat, which had the secretary of state’s statement, would only say fewer than 100. The Hindustan Times story later printed the district as 151. Democracy Docket and the Journal say 154.

The gap showed up as a count. The secretary of state’s office compared voters who checked in with ballots that had been uploaded and found about 388 more check-ins than ballots in Seminole County. Democracy Docket said the card itself held 388 votes and had not been uploaded to the county’s system on November 3. Once it was, Raffensperger’s office said Greene was leading by 262. On Friday night the secretary of state’s website showed Greene at 10,193 and James at 9,932. That is a lead of 261, one vote off the sentence in the statement. The results are still unofficial. Seminole County has until Monday to certify.

A card left out of the upload is the ballots. Leave it in the tray and James is the winner by a few dozen. Put it in the machine and Greene is the winner by a few hundred. Raffensperger’s line was the accurate one. “This oversight didn’t just affect the numbers — it changed who was leading an election. That is unacceptable, and we intend to find out exactly how it happened.”

The House math is why the card matters past Seminole. There are 180 seats. It takes 91 to pass a bill. Capitol Beat’s count, after the card, has Democrats on track for 92 seats without Greene’s, the first Democratic House in about two decades, and a cushion of one vote if his lead holds. Before the card, counting that seat as a Democratic flip, the same arithmetic is 93. They appear to have flipped 13 other Republican seats and lost two of their own. One more race is open. Mike Cheokas, the Republican from Americus, did not get a majority in a three-way, and he faces Democrat Ethan Wolfe in a runoff. If Wolfe wins, the cushion is two. None of that is certified.

The investigation is into how a card with several hundred votes sat out of Seminole County’s upload on election night. Raffensperger is the same secretary who refused to invent votes in 2020. This time his office is the one that found the discrepancy. Finding it on Friday is not the same as having counted it on Tuesday. For two days the apparent winner of a race that sizes a one-seat majority was whatever was left after a card got skipped.