US election: Joe Biden wins Georgia after controversial vote recount

US President-elect Joe Biden won Georgia and its 16 electoral votes, an extraordinary victory for Democrats who pushed to expand their electoral map across the Sun Belt.

Biden’s victory increases his Electoral College margin of victory over President Donald Trump. Biden now has 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.

A senior Georgia election official said on Thursday (Friday NZT) that a manual recount of votes cast in the presidential race had been completed, and the results confirmed Biden’s narrow lead over Trump.

The manual recount of approximately 5 million votes came from an audit required by a new state law and was not in response to any suspected issues with the state’s results or an official request for a recount.

Once the state certifies the election results, the losing campaign has two business days to request a recount if the margin remains within 0.5 percent. That recount would be done using scanners that read and count votes and counties would pay for it, Sterling said.

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 previously unscanned ballots were discovered during the audit, 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.

Going into the manual recount, Biden led Trump by a margin of about 14,000 votes. Previously uncounted ballots discovered during manual counting would reduce that margin to about 12,800, Sterling said.

Trump beat Georgia by 5 percentage points in 2016 over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Georgia had not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992.