GA Election Recount Confirms Biden Win, Certification Set

GEORGIA — As predicted by the Republican who heads Georgia's election office, the results of the hand review of the nearly 5 million votes cast in the presidential election President-Elect Joe Biden won the state and its 16 electoral votes. The announcement was expected earlier in the day, but was delayed until Thursday evening because one county was still auditing ballots.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the risk limiting audit of Georgia’s presidential contest, upheld and reaffirmed the original outcome produced by the machine tally of votes cast. Due to the tight margin of the race and the principles of risk-limiting audits, this audit was a full manual tally of all votes cast. The audit confirmed that the original machine count accurately portrayed the winner of the election, his office said in a news release.

“Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Raffensperger 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.”

Biden defeated President Donald Trump by 12,284 votes, according to the final count from the audit.

By law, Georgia was required to conduct the audit of a statewide race following the Nov. 3 elections.

The audit process also led to counties catching making mistakes they made in their original count by not uploading all memory cards. Those counties uploaded the memory cards and re-certified their results, leading to increased accuracy in the results the state will certify, the state said.

In Georgia’s recount, the highest error rate in any county recount was .73 percent. Most counties found no change in their finally tally. The majority of the remaining counties had changes of fewer than ten ballots.

Because the margin is still less than 0.5 percent, President Trump can request a recount after certification of the results. That recount would be done by rescanning all paper ballots.

Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said that results were expected to be released earlier Thursday but election workers in one county, which he didn't name, learned some ballots hadn't been audited yet.

"They are hand-tallying it now and for accuracy's sake we are letting them complete that process, so we can issue the most up-to-date and accurate audit report," Fuchs told CNN in the afternoon.

Another snag in the election process came when attorney L. Lin Wood Jr. filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the certification of Georgia's election results, The Associated Press reported. Wood claims Georgia illegally changed the process for handling absentee ballots, which the deputy secretary of state has called a “silly, baseless claim.”

The Georgia Secretary of State's office said Wednesday that the number of absentee ballot rejections because of signature issues increased about 350 percent in the November 2020 election in Georgia from the 2018 election. That's about the same rate of increase as the total number of absentee ballots accepted.

Numbers for total number of rejected absentee ballots for the 2020 election, including ballots received after the Election Day deadline, are not yet available.

Gabriel Sterling of the Georgia Secretary of State's Office told CNN "there are only approximately 300,000 ballots left to be hand-counted... and the vast majority of counties are reporting results that are 'spot dead on' to the initial tallies or finding only minor discrepancies."

The recount has shown no significant voting irregularities except for in Floyd County, where about 2,500 early-voting ballots initially went uncounted because of a malfunctioning scanner. About 1,600 of those ballots went for President Donald Trump, who had already won the Republican-leaning county by a wide margin.

On Thursday the Floyd County Board of Elections fired chief elections clerk Robert Brady after the 2,500 uncounted ballots were discovered. Citing two reprimands in the past six months, the board terminated Brady, according to The Rome News-Tribune.

Fayette County Elections Director Floyd Jones concluded that the 2,760 newly counted ballots added a net gain of 449 votes for Trump over Biden, according to The Citizen in Fayetteville. Trump had already beaten Biden in Fayette County's initial count, 35,653 to 30,789.

On Nov. 11, Raffensperger ordered a hand recount of the entire state's general election, which began the next day. He pledged the process would be transparent, with Democrats, Republicans and independents standing behind the vote counters as they checked every ballot.

The deadline for every county to complete the re-tally was Wednesday at midnight, and the deadline for the state to certify results is Nov. 20, the Associated Press reported.

"With the margin being so close, it'll require a full by-hand recount in each county," Raffensperger said last week. "This will help build confidence. It will be an audit, a recount and a re-canvass all at once. It will be a heavy lift, but we will work with the counties to get this done in time for our state certification. Many of these workers will be working overtime. We have all worked hard to bring fair and accurate counts to ensure the will of the voters is reflected in the final count, and that every voter will have confidence in the outcome, whether their candidate won or lost."

Sterling said last week that this will be "the largest hand re-tallying by an audit in the history of the United States," 11Alive reported.

Related: Is Georgia's Upcoming Ballot 'Audit' A Recount?: AP Explains

"Let me be perfectly clear on this: if it was 14,000 votes the other way, we would be doing the exact, same thing," Sterling said Nov. 12 during a news conference.

Once complete, Sterling said, "the final numbers in the audit count will almost definitely be slightly different than the numbers previously reported by the counties but the overall outcome should remain the same," the Associated Press reported. "The results will not be released piecemeal as the counties finish counting but instead will be announced once the full tally is complete, adding that the results of the new count from the audit is what will be certified."

The current margin of votes in Georgia between President Donald Trump and Biden shows the Democrat leading the president by 13,977 votes, according to the Secretary of State's Office.

Return to Patch for the latest vote tally. Subscribe to free News Alerts for election results.

Raffensperger has rebutted accusations by prominent Republicans that there were errors in Georgia's Nov. 3 general election. He called former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins a "liar" and a "charlatan" Monday in response to accusations of irregularities during the election.

Raffensperger also told The Washington Post that Sen. Lindsey Graham, an ally of President Donald Trump, had called him Friday and pressured him to throw out legal votes.

According to Raffensperger, Graham had asked if biased poll workers might have accepted non-matching signatures on ballots in a way that could favor Biden.

Raffensperger said he was stunned. Graham later denied the characterization as "ridiculous."
"If he feels threatened by that conversation, he's got a problem," Graham told The Washington Post. "I actually thought it was a good conversation."

Raffensperger said he's being targeted by both in-state and out-of-state Republicans to find ways to count Georgia's vote for Trump.

After finishing third behind fellow Republican Kelly Loeffler and Democrat Raphael Warnock in a special election to fill one of Georgia's U.S. Senate seats, Collins was tapped by the Trump campaign to lead recount efforts.

One of Trump's most vocal cheerleaders during his impeachment hearings, Collins said when chosen that he was "confident" that Republicans "will find evidence of improperly harvested ballots and other irregularities" that would prove Trump won Georgia "fairly."

Since then, Loeffler and another Republican forced into a runoff for a U.S. Senate seat, David Perdue, have demanded that Raffensperger step down because his management of the election was an "embarrassment" that "failed to deliver honest and transparent elections." Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, refused to resign, then ordered a recount of Georgia's vote.

"I'm an engineer. We look at numbers. We look at hard data," Raffensperger told The Washington Post. "I can't help that a failed candidate like Collins is running around lying to everyone. He's a liar."

Raffensperger expressed frustration to The Washington Post over unfounded claims of voter fraud coming from the Trump camp. He also said he and his wife had received death threats over the vote, including a text that read: "You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it."

On Sunday, Raffensperger pushed back on accusations of irregularities with posts on social media.