The Polk County Board of Elections will begin a pair of audits over election results made official last week, even though one last vote came in after and was noted as received and among those counted.

The Risk Limiting Audit and the 100% voluntary audit begin in the Board Meeting Room at the Polk County Police Department on Friday, November 15 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and continue on Monday, November 18 until it is completed.

Elections Director Noah Beck said the results of the election have already been certified by the board along with the rest of the counties across the State of Georgia, but these efforts are to ensure that the count is 100% accurate as the final tally goes to the Secretary of State’s office.

One additional note from Election Night that was positive for Polk: the county was once again the first to get initial ballot tallies into the Secretary of State for the Early Vote, a welcome change from election years past when the count might take hours to finish and have officials working well into the early morning.

“We are always glad that in the past few years of election results processing, we have been able to decrease the time it takes to report results from Polk County, and our staff can be proud that once again we were first to submit results to officials at the Secretary of State’s office,” Beck said.

It was the second time in recent elections that Polk County was first to submit voting results to the state, sometimes within seconds of others as a push to decrease processing time has provided voting results earlier than expected.

Beck added that even with the certification of the results last week on Friday by the Board of Elections, he expected the possibility there might be one more absentee ballot come in from someone overseas.

It turned out he was right, with the last ballot in the 2024 election arriving from the Mediterranean region earlier in the week. As the law provides, it was included in the count.

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