Video misidentifies Georgia voting official Gabriel Sterling

Georgia requires risk-limiting audits for all state and federal elections, which take place after an election and verifies results have been correctly certified. A video circulating online incorrectly identified an election official discussing these audits and conflates them with vote-counting procedures.

In an Instagram post captioned, “GA election official Gabriel Sterling says audits will take place after Election Day because it’s ‘nerve racking’ to count ballots in front of poll watchers,” a man in a video clip tells a CNN reporter how Georgia conducts audits.

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The person in the video is not Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer at Georgia’s secretary of state’s office. In both the Instagram video and the video’s full CNN transcript, the man is identified as Joseph Kirk, an elections supervisor in Bartow County, Georgia.

Kirk’s comments in the video were a response to the reporter asking him about a new Georgia rule passed Sept. 20 that would require a hand count of ballots alongside the machine counts already in place. A Georgia judge blocked the hand-count election rule Oct.15, saying it added “uncertainty and disorder” to the process weeks before Election Day.

In the clip aired Oct. 12, Kirk says:

“I want to be clear, I don’t have a problem at hand-counting ballots. There’s different times to do that, there’s different reasons to do that in the process we know we go through is called an audit. But we do it after the election, in a controlled environment where it’s easier to observe, easier to monitor the process and my folks have a chance to rest first. We’re just giving folks a chance to make a mistake. We’re just having very, very tired, in many cases, senior citizens try to hand count stuff in front of people, which can be nerve racking.”

Counting votes is a separate process from an audit. Georgia is one of five states that have statutes mandating risk-limiting audits. Votes are counted to determine an election’s outcome; risk-limiting audits check a sample of ballots after an election to verify that the results have been correctly certified.

Mike Hassinger, a Georgia secretary of state spokesperson, told PolitiFact in an email that risk-limiting audits have been conducted after election results were certified in every election since 2020 and are “open to observation by the public.”

Hassinger sent PolitiFact a calendar showing the risk-limiting audit for Georgia’s 2024 general election will take place Nov. 14 to Nov. 15. He said the audit  typically takes two to three days.

We rate the claim that Georgia election official Sterling says audits will take place after election day because it’s “nerve racking” to count ballots in front of poll watchers False.