ATLANTA — A statewide hand recount of more than 5 million votes cast for the presidential race in Georgia reaffirmed Joe Biden’s win in the Peach State but also exposed serious flaws with the state’s new $107 million voting system, something Republicans are likely to seize upon.
The audited vote totals by hand had Biden at 2,475,141, compared to President Trump’s 2,462,857, reducing Biden’s lead from about 14,000 votes to 12,284.
Poll workers worked around the clock and on the weekend in some counties to make Wednesday’s 11:59 p.m. deadline.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that the audit resulted in little change, “not a thimble full of difference,” and expected to certify the results Friday.
“Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” he said in a written statement. “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.”
The Associated Press called the election in Georgia for Biden at 8 p.m. EST on Thursday.
BREAKING: Joe Biden wins Georgia. #APracecall at 8:00 p.m. EST. #Election2020 https://t.co/lGfinjTqT4
— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) November 20, 2020
Georgia’s handling of the presidential election has ignited a nasty battle within the Republican Party on a state and national level.
The state, once considered a safe space for conservatives, turned blue on Nov. 3, and the blame game began almost immediately. What unfolded was a toxic mess full of name-calling and bitter in-fighting with Republicans taking sides: Trump or their state-elected GOP leaders.
The Trump campaign blamed Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Raffensperger for not pushing unfounded claims of election rigging and fraud.
As the days went by, the accusations only got worse and revealed a badly fractured base in need of repair ahead of twin runoff elections in January that will determine which party takes control of the U.S. Senate.
On Thursday morning, Trump tweeted that there were “almost ZERO ballots rejected in Georgia this election” and called out Kemp. His tweet was tagged with a “this claim about election fraud is disputed” warning.
Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani also continued to push claims of fraud and alleged Democratic officials engaged in a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election. Giuliani, in a frenzied press conference from the Republican National Committee headquarters on Thursday, said that voting machines were hacked and that there had been election meddling from by foreign communists and even members of militia groups.
The ex-New York mayor also claimed the Trump campaign would be filing a lawsuit in Georgia.
As the state waited for the hand count numbers to come in, a group of Trump’s faithful supporters gathered at the state Capitol to protest voting irregularities.
All eyes were on Georgia’s audit and recount efforts to see if it moved the needle for the sitting president.
It did not.
But in a whirlwind, one-of-a-kind election season, there is still a glimmer of hope for Trump backers.
Once Georgia certifies the election results, the losing campaign – in this case Trump – will have two business days to request a second recount, which would be done using scanners that read and tally votes, unlike the first recount which was done by hand. The second recount would be paid for by the counties, some of which are cash-strapped due to COVID-19.
It was up to Raffensperger to select which race would be audited, and he chose the presidential one, saying it made the most sense because of the tight margin separating the candidates.
Going into the hand recount, Biden led Trump by about 14,000 votes.
Previously uncounted ballots were discovered in four counties — during the hand count. In the other counties, there were only slight differences in the results, which state election officials repeatedly said was to be expected.
Discrepancies in Georgia’s recount numbers raised some eyebrows and exposed flaws in the state’s new $107 million voting system that could have resulted in some ballots being overlooked had it not been for the hand count.
In Floyd County, election workers missed counting 2,600 ballots because they didn’t rescan them after replacing an optical scanner that had a problem.
Election workers in Fayette, Walton, and Douglas counties found more than 3,300 new votes stored on memory cards that hadn’t been loaded into election computers. The Fayette and Walton votes favored Trump, while the Douglas votes favored Biden.
Fayette County Elections Board Chairman Darryl Hicks said the state’s previous system would have set off alarm bells if a memory card had not been counted but that the new system was more subtle.
“That would certainly be a good control to have in place,” Hicks said. “There are internal controls we need to have in place as well. We had opportunities to correct the problem.”
The memory card issue in Fayette occurred at the Fayetteville library early voting location, where a memory card had been replaced because it was reaching its capacity.
On election night, workers loaded a memory card for each early voting location, forgetting that the one at the library had been swapped out.
While Hicks praised the hand count for catching the error, he said election workers should have caught the mistake before the recount began. Similar missing memory card mistakes took place in Walton and Douglas counties.
DeKalb County voter Margaret Arnett, who created the Georgia Voters Guide website, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that voters need to be reassured that election officials will track every ballot.
“We need to fix the problems, but we don’t want to hurt voter confidence,” she told the newspaper. “I hear from voters all the time, ‘Why should I bother? It’s all corrupt.’ When you hear about stuff like this, how can you blame them? We’ve got to get it right.”
