Fulton Recertifies Results As State Finalizes Ossoff, Warnock, McDonald Victories

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Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock rally with President-elect Joe Biden in Atlanta ahead of their election to the U.S. Senate.

Credit: Stephen Fowler | GPB News

Democratic U.S. senators-elect Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock could be sworn into office as early as Wednesday, now that the Georgia Secretary of State's office has certified all 159 counties' results from the Jan. 5 runoff election.

Fulton County's elections board met Tuesday morning to recertify its results after discovering that memory cards with several hundred votes from a pair of precincts in Milton were not included in the tabulated results, but all of the images of each ballot that was scanned were there.

"The compact flashes, for whatever reason, didn't go into the tabulator," Fulton County Elections Director Rick Barron said. "So we had to add those two precincts into the results."

Gabriel Sterling with the secretary of state's office said the vote totals added 473 votes for former Sen. David Perdue and 185 for Ossoff, 468 for Sen. Kelly Loeffler and 190 for Warnock and 483 for Public Service Commissioner Bubba McDonald and 171 for challenger Daniel Blackman, and tweeted "this is why we have reviews at the state level."

The recertification did not delay the state's certification process, where officials confirmed the provisional, early in-person, absentee-by-mail and election day vote totals from more than 2,650 precincts in all 159 counties.

Now that the state certification is complete, Gov. Brian Kemp must approve the results, which must then be delivered to Washington, D.C., before Ossoff and Warnock can take the oath of office as Georgia's next U.S. senators. That swearing-in process is slated to happen Wednesday afternoon.