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A very narrow margin and an ongoing vote count are what make the Georgia contest between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden too early to convene.
Votes are still being counted across the state, though many of the counties where Biden was leading.
John Bazemore / AP
Ballot officials work on ballots at the Gwinnett County Voter Registration and Elections Headquarters in the US state of Georgia.
Biden topped the incumbent in Friday’s recount (local time) and earlier that night he led by 4,020 votes out of nearly 5 million votes cast, an advantage of about 0.08 percentage points. Under Georgia state law, a candidate may request a recount if the margin is within 0.5 percentage points.
The details
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The Georgia Secretary of State’s office said Friday morning that fewer than 8,200 absentee ballots remained to be counted and that 8,900 ballots mailed to military and overseas voters had yet to be returned. They must be received by 5pm on Friday to be counted. It was unclear how many ballots remained to be counted on Friday night.
Brynn Anderson / AP
A poll supervisor answers a poll worker’s questions as the general election vote counting continues at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia.
Gabriel Sterling, an official in the secretary of state’s office, said a recount is “more than likely, and people will see that the result will remain essentially the same.”
The Associated Press (AP) does not declare the winner of an election that will be, or is likely to be, subject to a mandatory recount. In cases where the law does not require a recount, but a candidate requests it, the AP will not call a race if the margin between the two leading candidates is 0.5 percentage point or less.
The AP election investigation found that there have been at least 31 recounts across the state since 2000. Three of them changed the outcome of the elections. The initial margins in those races were 137 votes, 215 votes and 261 votes.
Among the 31 counts, the largest change in results was 0.1% in the 2006 race for the position of Vermont Auditor. This was a low turnout election in which the initial results had one candidate winning by 137 votes. The candidate ultimately lost by 102 votes, for a swing of 239 votes.
Trump and Biden were embroiled in a close contest Friday to secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Georgia is a must-win state for Trump, who has a narrower path to victory than Biden. Trump prematurely declared that he was winning it early Wednesday morning.
John Bazemore / AP
Officials work on ballot papers at the Gwinnett County Voter Registration and Elections headquarters in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
Georgia Political Profile
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.
But control of the party has been loosened. As older, white, and Republican-leaning voters die, they are being replaced by a cast of younger and more racially diverse people, many of whom moved to the burgeoning Atlanta area from other states, and carried away your politics with them.
Overall, demographic trends show that the state’s electorate is getting younger and more diverse each year. Like other metropolitan areas, Atlanta’s suburbs have also turned away from Republicans. In 2016, Hillary Clinton switched Cobb and Gwinnett counties, where Biden currently leads.
In 2018, Democrat Stacey Abrams galvanized black voters in her bid to become the country’s first African-American woman to lead a state, a campaign she narrowly lost.
Many political analysts say it is not a question of whether, but when Georgia becomes an indecisive state. That became clear in the final weeks of the campaign as Biden; his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris; and former President Barack Obama swept the state. Trump also visited the state to play defense.
