Washington: US President-elect Joe Biden’s triumph in Georgia has been reaffirmed after the state completed its full hand recount, Georgia Secretary of State’s office declared.
The audit of around 5 million votes, which was finished on Thursday, discovered that the ex-Vice President got 12,284 more votes than President Donald Trump in the traditional Republican stronghold, reports Xinhua news organization.
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, said that every single vote was touched by a human audit team and counted
Gabriel added, “Obviously, the audit confirms the original result of the election, namely that Joe Biden won the presidential contest in the state of Georgia.”
A New York Times report announced that a large number of counties saw just minor changes in their tallies, with the recount vote totals differing by single digits.
No individual county demonstrated a variation in a margin bigger than 0.73 per cent, and the variation in a margin in 103 of the state’s 159 counties was under 0.05 per cent, said Sterling.
Nonetheless, the recount uncovered a couple of significant hiccups in the process, with four counties finding votes during the audit that were not part of the original count.
Three of these four counties were carried by Trump.
The state has until Friday to certify the election outcomes.
Biden announced victory for the US presidential election on November 7.
Trump hasn’t conceded and is mounting challenges in court over claims of voter fraud and counting misconduct.
A federal law sets what is known as the “Safe Harbour” deadline, falling on December 8, the day by which states must present the winner of the presidential election if they are to be insulated from legal disputes.
Electoral College representatives will have a meeting six days later, on December 14, to officially select the next US President.
With Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, Biden will currently have 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.
In 2016, Trump won Georgia by 5 percentage points over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
In the interim, Jenna Ellis, Trump campaign’s senior legal adviser accused the media of wrongly reporting that Biden has been announced as the winner in Georgia as the State has not yet certified its outcomes.
with IANSinputs
