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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Georgia will manually recount all ballots cast in the November 3 presidential election, the state’s top election official said on Wednesday, a mammoth task that must be completed by November 20.
Democrat Joe Biden garnered more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency on Saturday by winning Pennsylvania after four tense days of counting, delayed by an increase in mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic. Adding Georgia would only increase Biden’s margin of victory.
Republican President Donald Trump has refused to admit defeat, saying, without citing evidence, that the vote was marred by fraud.
The vote count in Georgia showed Biden ahead of Trump by only 14,101 votes out of about 5 million statewide. With the margin so small, a recount is needed, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said at a news conference.
“In fact, you have to do a full count of all the data, because the margin is very narrow,” Raffensperger said. “We want to start this before the week is out.”
“People will be working a lot of overtime for the next few weeks,” he said.
Officials will work in pairs, sorting stacks of ballots into stacks and counting them under the watch of observers from both political parties, Raffensperger said. The stacks will include ballots cast in person and by mail, he said.
“This is how it’s going to be until the end, and you’re going to tell it all. It’s a great process,” he said.
The scale of the effort is such that if the scrutiny is carried out 24 hours a day, officials will have to count more than 23,000 votes per hour in the nine days prior to the deadline for the results to be certified.
A study by the nonpartisan group Fair Vote found that out of 31 counts across the state between 2000 and 2019, the result changed in only three of them. More often, the winner won by a little more. On average, they changed the result by 0.024%, Fair Vote found, a much smaller margin than Trump would need. Biden currently leads Trump in Georgia by 49.5% to 49.2%.
The two US senators from Georgia, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both Republicans, on Monday called on Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, to resign over his management of the election. However, they did not present evidence of fraud.
(Reporting by Jason Lange, Julia Harte, and Tim Ahmann in Washington; Edited by Chizu Nomiyama and Sonya Hepinstall)
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