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WASHINGTON: Georgia was expected to release the results of a manual vote recount on Thursday (Nov. 19) reaffirming President-elect Joe Biden as the state winner, as Donald Trump and his legal team reiterated their allegations of widespread fraud.
If expectations hold up, Biden would be confirmed as the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the southern US state in nearly three decades.
President Trump has made unsubstantiated claims that Georgia’s roughly five million ballot count is rigged and that the state would “turn it around” if authorities pursue a fairer process.
But Georgia officials have defended the integrity of the audit and say there is no evidence the tally changes the result.
However, Trump sent his attorney Rudy Giuliani to hold a press conference Thursday in which he read affidavits alleging fraudulent election activity in several states and said the campaign would file a new lawsuit in Georgia.
Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, also blatantly accused Democrats of being “criminals” who committed massive fraud in various battle states “to steal an election from the American people.”
When Giuliani and other Trump lawyers described their claims, the president, apparently watching the proceedings televised, took to Twitter to applaud them for bringing “an open and closed case of voter fraud.”
President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has accused Democrats of a massive campaign of electoral fraud to help President-elect Joe Biden “steal” the November 3, 2020 election (Photo: AFP / Mandel Ngan)
Earlier in a tweet, Trump said Democrats “got caught” in Georgia, without explaining what he was referring to, and claimed that far more votes were about to be added to his column than he needed to reverse the result there.
Biden was declared the winner in Georgia last week after a tumultuous election in which the veteran Democrat prevailed overall by 306 votes to 232, denying Trump a second term.
Trump’s legal team has launched dozens of challenges, several of which have already been dismissed, on battlefields such as Pennsylvania, and requested recounts in Wisconsin.
In Michigan, the controversy simmered after a Republican canvassing board official who had refused to certify the outcome of the election in a heavily Democratic county later reversed his vote, before saying Thursday that he had received a call from Trump.
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“I was checking she was safe after seeing / hearing about the threats and the doxxing,” Palmer told the Detroit Free Press, referring to personal information posted about her on social media.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign on Thursday withdrew a federal lawsuit in Michigan that aimed to block the final certification of the state’s election results.
Biden won Michigan by 155,000 votes, more than ten times Trump’s margin of victory there in 2016.
ACCOUNT ‘DID HIS WORK’
In Georgia, Biden’s original margin of victory was just over 14,000 votes.
The manual count that began last week and ended Wednesday night narrowed that gap slightly to more than 12,700 early Thursday.
Some discrepancies were found in Republican-leaning counties, according to Gabriel Sterling, manager of Georgia’s voting system who helped monitor the so-called risk level audit.
“The good thing was that the audit did its job. It found those bands of votes,” he told Fox News.
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The problems, which were attributed to human error rather than fraud, included memory cards that were not scanned in Douglas and Walton counties, more than 2,700 missing votes in Fayette County, and 2,600 Floyd County ballots that were not scanned.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who like Sterling is a Republican, said there was no widespread electoral fraud and expressed virtual certainty that the recount did not change the outcome.
“I don’t think at the end of the day it’s going to change the overall results,” Raffensperger told CNN Wednesday night.
This has not stopped Trump from spreading false conspiracy theories about massive voter fraud in Georgia and elsewhere.
The laser-like focus in Georgia isn’t just about counting. The two state elections to the United States Senate will qualify for the second round on January 5.
With those races poised to determine which party controls the Senate next year, both Republicans and Democrats are pouring resources into the state.
By promoting the allegations of voter fraud, Trump and his allies could be fueling a narrative that elections are being stolen, which may lead Georgia Republicans to vote in large numbers.
