North Fulton Today

Mark Davis, President of Data Productions, said that he “fully supports” election rules recently adopted by the Georgia Election Board and says that the rules will enhance voter confidence by prioritizing accuracy over speed.

“My understanding of the proposed rule is that the counting it calls for was once standard operating procedure until the state told the counties to stop doing it. Also, the required counting would be broken down to the level of the early voting locations and/or the precincts, and broken down further to a daily count during early voting,” Davis told North Fulton Today. “This would leave only the Election Day votes, which again would split up and conducted at the precinct level. Given the general distrust many voters have of the process, and the obvious problems we saw in 2020 in Fulton County and elsewhere, I think it is wise to sacrifice speed for increased voter confidence in the results, so I fully support the rule.”

The Georgia Election Board has adopted an important certification rule, requiring reconciliation of voters to ballots before election tallies can be certified at the precinct level. Supporters of the proposal have compared reconciliation to the process required of bank tellers at the end of each day.

“Just as the bank teller’s cash drawer must reconcile daily, reconciliation of the voters to the ballots to the number of votes is imperative to ensure accurate election results,” supporters have argued.

The new ruling implements the statutory requirement of reconciliation, which already was codified in state election law.

The Republican majority Georgia Election Board voted 3-2 to adopt the rule. Chairman John Fervier, a Republican appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp, voted with the board's lone Democrat, Sara Tindall Ghazal, appointed by the state Democratic Party. 

Voting in favor were Dr. Janice W. Johnston, appointed by the state GOP; Rick Jeffares, appointed by the state Senate; and Janelle King, appointed by the state House.

Other features of the new rule include assurance of "one person-one vote," and it guards against certification of inaccurate or erroneous results, such as double scanning of ballots.

Further, through the process of reconciliation, the number of voters to ballots from all methods of voting - absentee, advance voting and on election day - must match. At each precinct, the Board will compare the number of unique names by each voting method to the number of ballots cast of each type.

Mark Davis is the President of Data Productions, Inc., and has been a voter data analyst since 1986.  He has been qualified and admitted to testify as an expert witness on voter data analytics five times in disputed elections over the last 22 years. New elections were ordered in four of those cases. He is also a contributing writer at The Federalist on issues related to election integrity.

Data Productions was incorporated in 1991 to provide project management, printing, data processing, and fulfillment services for large and small organizations.