Democrats will take control of the Senate as Ossoff wins

Gwinnett County election workers have begun scanning the roughly 5,000 absentee votes outstanding into the system.

They began at 1p.m. ET, expect to be finished by 5 p.m. ET and would soon thereafter push those numbers to the Secretary of State’s election results website, Gwinnett County public information officer Joe Sorenson told CNN. But depending on how many absentee ballots need to be adjudicated, that number could be lower.

The ballots are batched into 50 or 100 ballots. If one or more of those ballots needs to be adjudicated, the whole batch will be pulled. They are hoping to have adjudication panels come in this afternoon to handle the small amount of ballots they anticipate will need adjudication, but if they are not able to, then the batches pulled will not be included in the end of day count.

Sorenson told CNN he does not expect the number of ballots needing adjudication to be very high as the ballot only included three races. It leaves a smaller chance of voters making mistakes on their ballots. For example, if 10 ballots in 10 separate batches need adjudication, that could leave as many as 1,000 ballots from being included in the end-of-day count.

A reminder: Adjudication panels include one Democrat, one Republican and a neutral third-party that all must agree on the voter’s intent to cast their ballot for one candidate or another when a mistake has been on the ballot and is rejected by the scanner.