(EFE).- The state of Georgia on Tuesday confirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s win in the recent presidential election after finishing a manual recount of the votes that barely affected the results.
Biden received 2,475,141 votes (49.5 percent), while outgoing president Donald Trump won 2,462,857 (49.3 percent), according to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The manual recount trimmed the margin by which Biden led Trump by about 2,000 votes due to human error during the count, but not enough for Trump to catch up to Biden, who is the winner with a final difference of 12,284 votes.
“Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” said Raffensperger in a statement.
“The Risk Limiting Audit reaffirmed the outcome of the presidential race in Georgia as originally reported, with Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump in the state,” the statement added.
Biden becomes the first Democratic nominee to take the Southern state since Bill Clinton in 1992.
The secretary of state made the results of the hand audit public after a federal court in Atlanta in Georgia on Thursday dismissed yet another lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign seeking to halt the certification of the results.
Georgia is expected to make these results official on Friday, confirming the assignment of its 16 electoral college votes to Biden’s tally.
The secretary’s statement said “the differential of the audit results from the original machine counted results is well within the expected margin of human error.”
As the margin is still less than 0.5 percent, Georgia’s electoral law allows the Trump campaign until Tuesday to request another recount, this time mechanical.
Trump has referred to the manual recount in Georgia repeatedly, making unsubstantiated claims of election fraud and criticizing Republican Raffensperger, the chief election official in the state, who has received death threats.
“The Fake recount going on in Georgia means nothing because they are not allowing signatures to be looked at and verified,” the outgoing president, who has not yet acknowledged his electoral defeat, said this week on Twitter.
Trump and his allies have propagated the theory – refuted by Raffensperger himself – that mail ballots cannot be verified in Georgia which allowed votes to be cast on behalf of dead people.
Raffensperger, in fact, has claimed that Trump sabotaged himself by delegitimizing mail voting in the middle of the pandemic, resulting in a lower turnout of Republican voters than in the spring primaries, which may have cost him the state. EFE
© 2020 EFE News Services (U.S.) Inc.
—-
This content is published through a licensing agreement with Acquire Media using its NewsEdge technology.
Recent Comments