MACON, Ga. — Friday morning at 9 a.m., the Macon-Bibb Board of Elections will start the recount-by-hand process.
Mike Kaplan with the Board of Elections says it's a process that could take up five days.
"We'll go probably Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday," he says.
Election Day votes in Macon-Bibb County were certified this week. Kaplan says now, it's time to recount them.
He says poll workers will be paired up and all 71,000 from county voters will be accounted for. He says the state gave them specific instructions about what to do.
"In a pile in front of them, there'll be a Biden stack, a Trump stack, and a Jorgenson stack, and all we're looking at is the presidential race and they will put each ballot in one of those stacks and count it up," says Kaplan.
He says once the numbers are logged, workers will immediately write them on the top of each stack and then report them back to the Secretary of State's office. Kaplan says this whole operation will be open to the public.
"They can view it if they want to, they have to stay six feet away, we're having a lot of social distancing issues because we have to keep people six feet away," he says.
Kaplan says although it will be time consuming, he's confident that the numbers in Bibb County will stay the same..
"I can't wait for our numbers to show up and hopefully be the exact same numbers the machine showed. Wouldn't that be great?" he says.
Kaplan says as mandated by the state, they have until Wednesday, November 18, to get all votes counted and results sent back to the Secretary of State's office.
There will also be four poll watchers overseeing the counting -- two from the Republican party and two from the Democratic party.