Georgia House seat flips after memory card reveals hundreds of uncounted votes

A Georgia state House seat has flipped after officials found a memory card holding several hundred uncounted Election Day votes, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has opened an investigation into the county that failed to upload them. The discovery turned Republican incumbent Gerald Greene's 58-vote deficit into a 262-vote lead over Democrat Harry James in House District 154 in southwest Georgia. The county's board of elections identified approximately 388 additional votes after post-election checks found a mismatch between the number of ballots recorded and the number of ballots cast.

Greene has held the seat since January 1983. Before the discovery the race stood as a Democratic gain; the unofficial result now favours Greene, and the seat returns to the GOP if county officials certify before Monday's deadline.

The omission went unnoticed until routine post-election reconciliation compared recorded ballots against ballots cast. Raffensperger said election safeguards identified the discrepancy and that his office alerted county officials to a failure to properly upload election results; he is now investigating the same county over the failure those safeguards caught.

Georgia is the second US count dispute of the week. In Alaska, Mary Peltola's campaign has sued state election officials for access to rejected ballots in a Senate race separated by roughly 600 votes, betting the outcome turns on which campaign has mapped the discarded votes most thoroughly. There the fight is over ballots that were cast and thrown out; in Seminole County the problem was ballots that were cast and never counted at all. In both states the count was demonstrably incomplete until someone went looking, and in both states the remedies on offer are a lawsuit, an investigation and a certification deadline.

County officials have until Monday to certify a result that the initial count showed going the other way.