The US state of Georgia said on Friday it will recount votes in elections in which Joe Biden gained a minimal advantage over President Donald Trump.
Each of the presidential candidates had 49.4% of the votes counted, although Biden was ahead by 1,579 votes as of Friday morning with 4,169 remaining to count, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager said, Gabriel Sterling.
“With such a small margin, there will be a count in Georgia,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told reporters in Atlanta.
Raffensperger, the top elected official who oversees the elections, said the presidential race in the state “remains too close to be called.”
Near-complete results as of Friday morning showed Biden leading by just over 1,500 votes in Georgia, where demographic shifts and strong African-American turnout have put a southern state that was once considered to be at stake. a reliable endorsement of Trump’s Republicans.
Georgia is equally critical, as it is the only state holding elections for its two Senate seats this year, meaning it will determine which party is in control. Under Georgia’s system, Senate elections are eliminated if no candidate receives 50 percent in the first round.
“The final count in Georgia at this time has huge implications for the entire country,” Raffensperger said. “The stakes are high and emotions are running high everywhere. We will not let those debates distract us from our work. We will do well and uphold the integrity of our elections.”
He said Georgia was allowing observers for both campaigns to watch the count after Trump, without evidence, alleged widespread fraud across the country.
Authorities said some 9,000 military and foreign ballots were still pending and could be accepted if they arrive on Friday and are postmarked on or before Tuesday.
Georgia has long been a Republican stronghold. Voters there have not favored a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992. Trump beat Hillary Clinton there by 5 percentage points in 2016. And the state government is dominated by the Republican Party.
There are two ways to request a count in Georgia. A presidential candidate who loses by 0.5% of the vote or less can force a recount by submitting a written request to the secretary of state, or a candidate can ask the secretary of state to conduct one by alleging a “discrepancy or error” in the tabulation of votes. In that case, state law gives the clerk the discretion to conduct a count.
Local election officials in Georgia may also conduct recounts in their counties if they believe there is a discrepancy in the results.
The southern state switched to new touchscreen voting machines this year. After a voter makes their choices, the machine produces a marked paper ballot that is fed into a scanner that counts the vote.
Absentee voters, hundreds of thousands this year, filled out the same ballots, which were also fed into the scanners. If the scanner cannot read the ballot, a bipartisan group of elections officials review it to determine whether or how it should be counted.
A count essentially repeats that process, and you haven’t made any big changes to the results in the past.
As such, a recount is considered unlikely to have a large effect on the state’s total vote.
(With contributions from AFP and Reuters)
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