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Gwinnett County election workers process ballots for the 2020 presidential recount at the Beauty P. Baldwin Voter Registration and Election Building on November 16, 2020 in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
Megan Varner | Getty Images
The manual count for the presidential race in Georgia is complete and the results confirm Democrat Joe Biden’s lead over Republican President Donald Trump.
The manual recount of nearly 5 million votes stemmed from an audit required by a new state law and was not in response to suspected issues with the state’s results or a request for an official recount. The state has until Friday to certify the results that have been certified and submitted by the counties.
Once the state certifies the election results, the losing campaign has two business days to request a recount if the margin stays below 0.5%. That recount would be done using scanners that would read and count the votes and would be paid for by the counties, said Gabriel Sterling, who oversees Georgia’s voting systems.
It was up to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to select which race to audit, and he said the presidential race made the most sense because of its importance and the narrow margin between candidates. Because of that small margin, Raffensperger said a full recount was needed.
Raffensperger, in a statement Thursday, said the results reaffirmed the integrity of the state’s electoral process.
“Georgia’s first historic statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot system is accurately counting and reporting results,” he said. “It is an honor to the hard work of our county and local election officials who acted swiftly to undertake and complete such a momentous task in a short period of time.”
In the Georgia recount, Raffensperger’s office said in the statement that the highest error rate of any county recount was 0.73%. Most counties saw no change in their final count. The majority of the remaining counties had changes of less than ten ballots.
Going into the tally, Biden led Trump by a margin of around 14,000 votes. Previously uncounted ballots discovered in four counties during the manual count will reduce that margin to about 12,800, Sterling said.
Data released Thursday as part of the audit showed that Biden’s lead was reduced from 12,780 to 12,284 votes, including 496 to Trump.
Other counties saw slight differences in results as they were counted, and state election officials had always said that was to be expected.
NBC News screened Biden as the winner.
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