A manual recount of ballots cast in Georgia for the U.S. presidential race has reaffirmed Joe Biden’s lead over President Donald Trump, the state’s top election official confirmed Thursday.
The highly anticipated report comes amid a contentious battle over the results of the November election, which Biden is projected to have won.
Biden’s lead over Trump in the traditionally Republican-leaning state was nearly 13,000 votes before Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ordered the audit of ballots cast for president, which he did after many unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
The final results now show that lead largely unchanged, with Trump improving his vote total by just under one per cent.
“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.
Georgia is the last state yet to be called for either Biden or Trump by the Associated Press, which has a practice of not calling states that are subject to a recount.
Because Biden’s lead over Trump is still less than 0.5 per cent of all votes cast, state law says the Trump campaign can still request another recount after the state election results are certified this month.
Unlike this manual audit, where the roughly 5 million paper ballots cast were counted by hand, a recount requested by Trump would see those ballots get electronically scanned.
More to come
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