Auditing the 2020 General Election in Georgia: Residual Vote Rates and a Confusing Ballot Format.

The 2020 general election in the United States took place against the backdrop of a pandemic and countless claims about voter fraud. The presidential race in Georgia was extremely close, and in this state both a hand and machine recount followed the initial promulgation of results. Armed with certified results, we conduct a statistical audit of the 2020 Georgia election by analyzing residual vote rates in statewide races. A race's residual vote rate combines the rates at which ballots contain undervotes (abstentions) and overvotes (when voters cast more than the allowed number of votes in a race). Anomalously high residual vote rates can be indicative of underlying election administration problems, and our analysis of these rates in Georgia finds nothing anomalous in the state's presidential race, a notable result given this contest's closeness. We do, however, uncover an unusually high overvote rate in Georgia's special United States Senate election. This overvote rate is concentrated in Gwinnett County and appears to reflect the county's two-column ballot design that led roughly 4,200 voters to select more than one candidate for Senate in the special election, in the process rendering invalid their votes in this contest. Gwinnett County's two-column ballot was not pivotal to the outcome of Georgia's Senate special election but nonetheless joins other ballot formats, like the infamous butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County in the 2000 presidential race, that contribute to voter confusion and should be avoided in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]