[ad_1]
A senior election official in the U.S. state of Georgia says a manual recount of votes cast in the U.S. presidential race was completed, and the results confirm Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow lead over Republican President Donald Trump.
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 (local time) to certify the results that have been certified and submitted by the counties.
Andrew Harnik / AP
A post-election manual recount of more than five million ballots in the state of Georgia has reaffirmed Joe Biden’s advantage over President Donald Trump.
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 late Thursday that the audit was complete and the results would soon be posted on the secretary of state’s website.
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.
READ MORE:
* Trump targets vote certification in late attempt to block Biden
* Lindsey Graham is criticized for claims she pressured Georgia to discard the ballots
* US Elections: Georgia Is Counting Nearly Five Million Ballots By Hand In A Post-Election ‘Audit’
* US Elections: Why Georgia Hasn’t Been Called Yet
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.
Mike Stewart / AP
Ballots are stored on portable shelves at a Cobb County polling facility while ballots are handled by officials during an audit in Marietta, Georgia.
“Every vote was touched by a human audit team and counted,” he said. “Obviously, the audit confirms the original result of the election, that is, Joe Biden won the presidential race in the state of Georgia.”
The results to be certified are the totals certified by the counties, not the results of the audit.
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. Untold ballots previously discovered during manual counting will reduce that margin to about 12,800, Sterling said.
The Associated Press has not declared a winner in Georgia, where Biden led Trump by about 0.3 percentage points. There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law provides that option to a candidate who falls behind if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points. The practice of AP is not to call a race that is, or could be, subject to recount.
