Georgia manual recount confirms Biden victory

A manual recount of nearly 5 million ballots cast in Georgia showed Thursday that Joe Biden won the presidential election, validating initial results.

The recount found that Biden received 12,284 more votes than President Donald Trump.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger plans to certify the election by Friday, a deadline set by state law to finalize results.

The hand recount, which also functioned as an audit of the election, mostly aligned with initial machine counts. It also uncovered almost 6,000 ballots in four counties that had been overlooked in the initial tally, resulting in Trump closing his deficit to Biden by 1,400 votes.

The hand recount showed some differences from the original machine count, which election officials said they expected. The margin in the recount between Biden and Trump was about 500 fewer votes than unofficial estimates of the machine count from the secretary of state’s office.

The recount and audit, ordered by Raffensperger last week, was a major effort to verify the results of the presidential election.

“Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Raffensperger said. “This is a credit to the hard work of our county and local elections officials who moved quickly to undertake and complete such a momentous task in a short period of time.”

Most counties found no change in their final tally, and most of the remaining county found changes of fewer than 10 ballots, the audit showed. No county had an error rate higher than 0.73% compared to their original results.

Initial election results were produced by optical scanners that read either bar codes on printed-out paper ballots or filled-in ovals on absentee ballots.

Biden is on track to receive Georgia’s 16 votes in the Electoral College, which will meet Dec. 14.