A top Georgia election official said Thursday that a hand tally of ballots cast in the presidential race has been completed, and that the results affirm Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow lead over Republican President Donald Trump. Following the announcement, the Associated Press called the state for Biden, giving him 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 with every state counted.
Biden has won Georgia and its 16 electoral votes, according to the Associated Press (AP), marking an extraordinary victory for Democrats who pushed to expand their electoral map through the Sun Belt.
The win by Biden pads his Electoral College margin of victory over President Donald Trump. Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election on Nov. 7 after flipping Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to the Democrats’ column.
Biden now has 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.
Trump won Georgia by 5 percentage points in 2016 over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
In 2020, Democrats had focused heavily on the state, seeing it in play two years after Democrat Stacey Abrams narrowly lost the governor’s race. Both of Georgia’s Senate seats were on the ballot this year, further boosting the state’s political profile as well as spending by outside groups seeking to influence voters. Those two races are headed to a January runoff.
Georgia hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992.
Hand recount
The AP’s declaration of victory for Biden in Georgia, the last state left to be called, came after top election officials announced that an audit of votes hadn’t substantially changed the initial result.
The hand tally of about 5 million votes stemmed from an audit required by a new state law and wasn’t in response to any suspected problems with the state’s results or an official recount request. The state has until Friday to certify results that have been certified and submitted by the counties.
The counties were supposed to finish the hand count by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting system, said Thursday evening 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%. That recount would be done using scanners that read and tally the votes and would be paid for by the counties, Sterling said.
It was up to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to select the race to be audited, and he said the presidential race made the most sense because of its significance and the tight margin separating the candidates. Because of that small margin, Raffensperger said a full hand recount was necessary.
Votes that hadn’t previously been counted were found in several counties during the audit, which required recertification of the election results in those counties.
In Floyd County, more than 2,500 ballots were discovered during the audit that hadn’t previously been scanned, and the secretary of state’s office had called for the firing of the county’s chief elections clerk, Robert Brady. The county elections board on Thursday voted to issue a written reprimand to Brady and, because it was his second written reprimand within six months, to fire him in accordance with county policy, board member Melanie Conrad said in an email.
Several other counties found memory cards with votes that hadn’t been uploaded and counted prior to the audit.
Going into the hand tally, Biden led Trump by a margin of about 14,000 votes. The previously uncounted ballots discovered during the hand count will reduce that margin to about 12,800, Sterling said.
There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law provides that option to a trailing candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points. It is AP’s practice not to call a race that is — or is likely to become — subject to a recount.
(FRANCE 24 with AP)
