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The Trump campaign has called for a recount in Georgia, the campaign announced on Saturday night. President-elect Joe Biden won the state by more than 12,000 votes.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp, both Republicans, have previously approved election results. Georgia allows a candidate to request a recount after certification if the margin of victory is less than 0.5 percentage point. Mr. Biden gained just over 0.2%.
“President Trump and his campaign continue to insist on an honest recount in Georgia, which must include matching signatures and other vital guarantees,” the Trump campaign said in a statement on Saturday.
Georgia already conducted a full manual recount of all the ballots in the state earlier this week at Raffensperger’s request. During the recount, several flashcards were found in various counties containing votes that were not declared in the original count. The inclusion of those votes reduced Mr Biden’s lead slightly, but was not enough to reverse the preliminary election results.
Since the election, President Trump has repeatedly asserted without any evidence that thousands of mail-in ballots accepted in the state of Georgia did not have properly matching signatures. Kemp, after certifying the results, called on Raffensperger to “consider addressing these concerns” and to perform “a sample verification of signatures on absentee voting envelopes and to compare these to the signatures on requests and in records that the office of the Secretary of State “.
The Georgian Secretary of State’s office has repeatedly reiterated that at this point in the process it is not possible to match the signatures – which has already taken place as part of a signature verification process in two stages – because the ballots are separated from the envelopes to ensure secrecy. voter selections.
Raffensperger issued a statement on Thursday saying: “2,011 mail-in ballots were rejected in the November 2020 elections for missing or mismatched signatures out of 1,322,529 mail-in ballots. He noted that “the rejection rate of 0.15% for signature issues was the same in the 2018 and 2020 general elections” and that the increase in the number of rejected ballots was consistent with the increase in the number of ballots. received.
The recount requested by the Trump campaign will be an automatic recount.
Georgia was one of five states Mr. Biden abandoned when Mr. Trump won in 2016. The state has not voted to send a Democrat to the White House since former President Bill Clinton l ‘won in 1992.
Caroline Linton contributed reporting.
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