Georgia’s presidential recount confirms Joe Biden won state. What comes next?
A machine recount of Georgia’s presidential ballots confirmed President-elect Joe Biden won Georgia.
Biden’s margin of victory was less than 12,000 — about 1,000 fewer votes than the initial tally, according to data from Georgia’s secretary of state office. The results were recertified Monday afternoon, state officials said.
It was the third time since Nov. 3 that county elections workers tallied the nearly 5 million votes. Following the initial count, a statewide hand audit confirmed Biden as the winner. The audit showed a 0.1053% variation in the statewide total and a 0.0099% variation from the initial margin of victory. Officials with Georgia’s secretary of state office have said for several weeks now that Biden was the likely winner.
Under Georgia election law, President Donald Trump was able to request a recount because Biden’s margin of victory was within 0.5%. Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since 1992.
“It’s been a long 34 days since the election on Nov. 3,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “We’ve now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remained unchanged.”
Attacks on election results
The recount’s end comes as Trump and some of his supporters continue to push false claims about widespread voter fraud in Georgia. The secretary of state’s office has spent the past several weeks debunking misinformation and conspiracy theories.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigations will assist the secretary of state’s office with 250 active cases tied to voting irregularities in 2020, but state election officials have denied that widespread fraud occurred.
“I know there are people that are convinced the election was fraught with problems,” Raffensperger said Monday. “But the evidence — the actual evidence — the facts, tell us a different story.”
Elections officials have been threatened, and prominent Republican politicians have questioned the integrity of the state’s election results. U.S. Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler called on Raffensperger to resign, describing his handling of the election as “an embarrassment.” Trump has repeatedly attacked one-time ally Gov. Brian Kemp over the outcome.
Kemp and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan issued a joint statement Sunday evening rejecting a call from Trump and four Georgia state Senators to convene a special session of the Georgia General Assembly in an effort to overturn Biden’s victory.
“State law is clear: the legislature could only direct an alternative method for choosing presidential electors if the election was not able to be held on the date set by federal law,” a portion of the statement reads. “The judicial system remains the only viable — and quickest — option in disputing the results of the November 3rd election in Georgia.”
Beyond Trump’s appeals to Kemp, the president’s legal team and his supporters have filed lawsuits contesting Georgia’s election results. A lawsuit filed by pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood was dismissed by a United States District Court judge Monday morning, Georgia Public Broadcasting reports. A separate lawsuit was filed Dec. 4 on behalf of Trump’s campaign and David Shafer, chairman of the state’s Republican party.
Raffensperger again spoke out against election disinformation, saying the “truth matters.” In a Wall Street Journal opinion article published Sunday evening, Raffensperger said Trump was using a “playbook” established by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. The state’s top election official drew parallels between Trump’s actions in 2020 to Abrams’ “refusal to concede” to Kemp in the closely fought 2018 election.
“All of this talk about a stolen election, whether it’s Stacey Abrams or the president of the United States, is hurting our state,” Raffensperger said during Monday’s news conference. “It is now time to direct our energies towards the Jan. 5 runoff election.”
Georgia’s Senate runoffs
Georgia’s two Senate runoffs will determine which party controls the chamber, and nearly 1.1 million absentee ballots have been requested for the January election. More than 43,000 ballots have been returned and accepted as of Monday morning, said the state’s voting system implementation manager Gabriel Sterling.
Monday was the deadline to register for the Jan. 5 election, and national political figures have flocked to Georgia ahead of the runoffs. Trump held a rally in support of Loeffler and Perdue Saturday evening. Former President Barack Obama campaigned for Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in a virtual event last week. Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang appeared in Columbus Sunday to campaign for Warnock and Ossoff.
Warnock and Loeffler debated Sunday night, with both candidates alleging their opponent was out of touch with Georgia voters. Loeffler dodged questions about Trump’s false claims that he won Georgia, while Warnock dodged questions about expanding the number of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Perdue declined to attend the Sunday evening debate with Ossoff. The Republican incumbent was represented by an empty podium.
Recent polling shows the two Senate runoffs are neck-and-neck. FiveThirtyEight, a news website that uses or creates statistical information to publish articles on a wide variety of political topics, compiles polling averages and has the Democratic challengers leading. Ossoff is ahead of Perdue by 0.8%, and Warnock leads Loeffler by 2.2%.
This story was originally published December 7, 2020 at 10:23 AM.