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The US state of Georgia has completed a manual recount of all ballots for the presidential election and the results confirm Joe Biden’s victory in the state, local officials announced Thursday night.
“The audit confirmed that the original count accurately represented the winner of the election,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a statement.
The confirmation makes Biden the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the southern U.S. state in nearly three decades, despite allegations of fraud from rival Donald Trump.
Biden beat Trump by 12,284 votes, according to the final audit results, a slight drop compared to the initial results (14,000).
State law requires Georgia to certify its election results by Friday. However, as the difference between the two candidates is still very small, Trump, who disputes the defeat, may request another recount, clarified the office of the Georgia secretary of state, responsible for the elections.
During the count, which lasted about a week, officials from four counties found new batches of votes that were either not counted on Election Day or that were not correctly transmitted to the Secretary of State for recount, CNN recalls.
In all, more than 5,800 uncounted votes were discovered, yielding nearly 1,400 new votes for Trump, who claimed the findings were evidence of wrongdoing. State officials, however, stressed that these were errors caused by human error and not by any organized act of electoral fraud.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Republican, has been criticized by Trump and the state’s Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who called on Raffensperger to resign, accusing him of not “having conducted honest and transparent elections.”
Biden’s victory in Georgia extends the Democratic Electoral College’s advantage over Trump.
Biden was declared the winner of the November 7 presidential election, having won three major states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Biden now has 306 delegates in the Electoral College, to Trump’s 232.
