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WASHINGTON / ATLANTA (Reuters) – Georgia’s secretary of state said on Friday that he expects a recount of presidential votes in the battlefield state, where Democrat Joe Biden has a slight advantage over Republican President Donald Trump.
Each of the candidates had 49.4% of the votes counted, although Biden was ahead by about 1,500 votes as of Friday morning with 4,169 regular votes to be counted, the Voting System Implementation Manager said. Georgia, Gabriel Sterling.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, said he expects the margin in the presidential race to be a few thousand votes.
“With such a small margin, there will be a recount,” Raffensperger told reporters.
Officials also said that about 9,000 military and foreign ballots were still pending and could be accepted if they arrive on Friday and are postmarked Tuesday or earlier.
A recount cannot be started until Georgia’s current votes are certified, which this year is expected on or before November 20.
Sarah Wilcox, 50, a furniture designer who attended an event in Atlanta for Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossof on Friday, said she was not surprised by the likelihood of a recount.
“I think it is reasonable even amid the unreasonable reports of voter fraud and mail ballots. I wish they would just call the count, but I accept the count as legitimate,” he said.
LITTLE CHANGE EXPECTED
There are three official reasons for a count in Georgia.
A presidential candidate who loses by 0.5% of the vote or less can send a written request to the secretary of state, or a candidate can allege “discrepancy or error” in the vote tabulation. In the latter, state law gives the clerk discretion as to whether 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, which produced a marked paper ballot that is fed into a scanner that counts the votes.
Absentee voters, hundreds of thousands this year, filled out the same ballots by hand, 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.
Recounts rarely produce large changes in voting results in the United States. Added a tally of Wisconsin voting results in the 2016 election https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-recount/green-party-us-election-recount-bid-comes -to-a-close -idUSKBN1411QE 131 votes to Trump’s 22,000-plus vote lead.
“I wouldn’t expect a recount to change the numbers much,” said Bryan Sells, an Atlanta election attorney who does not represent either campaign.
(Reporting by Simon Lewis, Daphne Psaledakis and Brad Heath in Washington and Katanga Johnson in Atlanta; Edited by Heather Timmons and Alistair Bell)
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