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A senior Georgia election official said today that a manual recount of votes cast in the presidential race has been completed and the results affirm the narrow lead of Democrat Joe Biden over Republican President Donald Trump.
Joe Biden. Source: Associated Press
The manual recount of about five million votes was derived from an audit required by a new state law and was not in response to any suspected problems with the state’s results or an official request for a recount. The state has until Friday to certify the results that have been certified and submitted by the counties.
Counties were supposed to end the hand count at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting system, said Thursday night that the audit was complete. The results were posted on the secretary of state’s website.
No individual county showed a margin variation greater than 0.73 percent, and the margin variation in 103 of the state’s 159 counties was less than 0.05 percent, Sterling said.
“Every vote was touched by a human audit team and counted,” he said. “Obviously, the audit confirms the original result of the election, namely that Joe Biden won the presidential race in the state of Georgia.”
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But that hasn’t discouraged Donald Trump from tweeting more allegations of voter fraud today. Source: BBC
The results to be certified are the totals certified by the counties, not the results of the audit.
After the state certifies the election results, the losing campaign has two business days to request a recount, as the margin remains within 0.5 percent. That count would be done using scanners that read and count the votes and counties would pay for it, the secretary of state’s office said.
The Associated Press has not declared a winner in Georgia.
It is up to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to select the race to be audited, and he said the presidential race made more sense because of its importance and the narrow margin that separates the candidates. Because of that small margin, Raffensperger said a full manual count was necessary.
Votes that had not previously been counted were found in various counties during the audit, which required recertification of election results in those counties.
In Floyd County, more than 2,500 ballots were discovered during the audit that had not been previously scanned, and the secretary of state’s office had called for the firing of the county’s chief elections clerk, Robert Brady. The county board of elections voted Thursday to issue a written reprimand to Brady and, because it was his second written reprimand in six months, to fire him in accordance with county policy, board member Melanie Conrad said in a email.
Several other counties found memory cards with votes that had not been loaded and counted prior to the audit.
