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WASHINGTON: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Friday (Nov. 6) that he expects a recount due to the narrow margin for presidential elections in the battlefield state, where Democrat Joe Biden has a slight advantage over President Donald Trump of more than 1,000 votes. , with 4,169 remaining to count.
“With such a small margin, there will be a tally in Georgia,” Raffensperger said.
He said the final count in Georgia has “huge implications” for the entire country.
“The stakes are high and emotions are running high everywhere. We will not let those debates distract us from our work. We will do well and uphold the integrity of our elections.”
He said Georgia was allowing observers for both campaigns to watch the count after Trump, without evidence, alleged widespread fraud across the country.
Edison Research reports that with 99 percent of the estimated votes counted so far, Trump has 49.4 percent of the votes, and Biden also has 49.4 percent.
Authorities said some 9,000 military and foreign ballots were still pending and could be accepted if they arrive on Friday and are postmarked on or before Tuesday.
There are two ways to request a count in Georgia. A presidential candidate who loses by 0.5 percent of the vote or less can force a recount by submitting a written request to the secretary of state, or a candidate can ask the secretary of state to run one alleging a “discrepancy or error” in the tabulation of votes. In that case, state law gives the clerk the discretion to conduct a count.
Local election officials in Georgia may also conduct recounts in their counties if they believe there is a discrepancy in the results.
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The southern state switched to new touchscreen voting machines this year. After a voter makes their choices, the machine produces a marked paper ballot that is fed into a scanner that counts the vote.
Absentee voters, hundreds of thousands this year, filled out the same ballots, which were also fed into the scanners. If the scanner cannot read the ballot, a bipartisan group of elections officials review it to determine whether or how it should be counted.
A count essentially repeats that process, and you haven’t made any big changes to the results in the past. As such, a recount is considered unlikely to have a large effect on the state’s total vote.
Winning Georgia’s 16 electoral votes would push the former vice president to more than 270 votes, the amount he needs to secure the presidency.
The change in Georgia came hours after Trump appeared at the White House to falsely claim that he was “stealing” the election. His campaign is pursuing a series of lawsuits in the battlefield states that legal experts described as unlikely to alter the outcome of the elections.
Trump’s lead had steadily diminished in Georgia, a southern state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton took office in 1992, as officials worked with tens of thousands of uncounted votes, many of whom Democratic strongholds like Atlanta.
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There is some uncertainty surrounding Arizona, which has 11 electoral votes.
The Trump campaign said it was confident the president would eventually win a victory in Arizona, where votes were also being counted, including in Maricopa County, the most populous area in the state.
The Associated Press called Arizona for Biden and said it is monitoring the vote count as it goes. With Arizona, Biden would currently have 264 electoral votes.
Several US outlets, including CNN and NBC News, have refrained from calling Arizona, putting Biden at 253 electoral votes in total.
The Democratic challenger also advanced in the race for Pennsylvania, opening a 5,500-vote lead ahead of Trump.
Biden would become the next president by winning Pennsylvania or by winning Georgia or Nevada. Trump’s most likely path seems narrower: He needs to hold on to both Pennsylvania and Georgia and also overtake Biden in Nevada or Arizona.
