The US state of Georgia has completed a manual recount of all the ballots cast there in the presidential election, and the results confirm Joe Biden’s win in the state, a local official announced Thursday.
“The audit confirmed that the original machine count accurately portrayed the winner of the election,” a statement posted on the website of Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger said.
The confirmation makes Biden the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the southern US state in almost three decades, despite his rival Donald Trump’s claims of fraud.
Biden beat Trump by 12,284 votes, according to the final results from the audit. This is a slight drop for Biden compared to the pre-audit results.
Officials have said repeatedly that the audit confirmed there was no widespread fraud or irregularities in the election.
Georgia is required under state law to certify its election results by Friday.
“Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said in a statement.
“This is a credit to the hard work of our county and local elections officials who moved quickly to undertake and complete such a momentous task in a short period of time.”
There is no state where the sting of Trump’s loss has been more acutely felt than in the red state of Georgia.
The suburban revolt against Trump in the suburbs surrounding Atlanta paired with huge turnout among Black voters, powered Biden’s gains in the state, building on years of intensive Democratic organizing to register voters.
The Biden campaign’s communications director for Georgia, Jaclyn Rothenberg, said in a statement Thursday evening that the recount outcome, “simply reaffirmed what we already knew: Georgia voters selected Joe Biden to be their next president.”
“We are grateful to the election officials, volunteers and workers for working overtime and under unprecedented circumstances to complete this recount, as the utmost form of public service,” she said.
During the weeklong recount, officials in four counties found new batches of votes that weren’t counted on Election Day or weren’t properly transmitted to the Secretary of State for tallying.
In all, more than 5,800 uncounted votes were uncovered, netting nearly 1,400 new votes for Trump, who falsely said the discoveries were proof of wrongdoing. State officials stressed that these were accidents caused by human error and not indicative of fraud or vote-rigging.
Raffensperger’s office called the difference between the audit results and the original machine-counted results “well within the expected margin of human error that occurs when hand-counting ballots.”
Ben Adida — the executive director of the election security nonprofit VotingWorks, which assisted Georgia with the audit — said in a statement, “Georgia’s first statewide audit successfully confirmed the winner of the chosen contest and should give voters increased confidence in the results.”
AFP
