Georgia confirms Biden's victory as it completes hand audit of ballots
The state of Georgia in the United States confirmed Democratic President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the Nov. 3 election in the state as it completed a hand audit of ballots on Thursday.
Biden obtained 2,475,141 votes (49.5%) ahead of the still US president, Donald Trump, with 2,462,857 (49.3%), according to the Georgia Secretary of State, the electoral authority in the state.
With manual counting Trump cut about 2,000 votes as a result of human error during the vote, but they were not enough to catch up with Biden, winner with a final difference of 12,284 votes. Biden thus became the first Democrat to win in southern Georgia. since Bill Clinton did it in 1992.
The Secretary of State made the count public after today a federal court in Atlanta (Georgia) rejected the umpteenth lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign that aimed to delay the certification (officialization) of the results.
In this way, it is foreseen that Georgia make these results official this Friday, which will confirm the assignment of his 16 delegates in the Electoral College to Biden.
As the difference is less than 0.5%, the electoral law in Georgia allows the Trump campaign to request until next Tuesday a new recount, this time mechanical.
Trump has referred to manual recount in Georgia repeatedly pouring out accusations without proof and has criticized the secretary of state, the highest electoral authority, Republican Brad Raffensperger, who has received death threats.
“The false count that is happening in Georgia does not mean anything because they do not allow the signatures to be examined 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 in Georgia mail ballots cannot be verified which would have led to them voting even dead. Raffensperger, in fact, has stated that Trump boycotted himself by delegitimizing the postal vote at the height of the pandemic, resulting in a lower turnout of Republican voters than in the primaries held in spring, which would have cost him the state.
