Georgia completes hand recount of ballots, affirms Joe Biden's win: Election Officials

President-elect Joe Biden on November 19 was projected a winner in Georgia’s election by the Associated Press after Georgia’s election officials affirmed Joe Biden's lead post a full hand recount of nearly 5 million ballots. The lead makes the Democratic presidential candidate Biden the first to win the state in over 30 years. According to the risk-limiting audit report released by the state of Georgia, Biden who was ahead of US President Trump by 14,000 vote lead is now leading by just over 12,000 votes. 

“Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a 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,” he added. 

Meanwhile the Executive Director of VotingWorks, Ben Adida said that the difference between the reported results and the full manual tally is “well within the expected error rate of hand-counting ballots”, adding, Georgia’s first statewide audit successfully confirms the winner. According to election officials, the audit process did catch discrepancies ignored in the original count, such as missing memory cards. But the counties eventually uploaded the memory cards and re-certified their results to deliver more accurate results.

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“Hand counting of votes in post-election audit or recount procedures can result in error rates of up to 2 percent,” researchers at US Rice University and Clemson University had predicted.

Meanwhile, Georgia’s elections director, Gabriel Sterling, had also stated that President Donald Trump’s attempts of hand recount in states of Georgia and Wisconsin are unlikely to change the election outcomes. GA Elections Director Janine Eveler told Fox News reporters at Cobb County that “she hasn't seen anything during the by-hand audit that would cast any doubt on the election results.”

Reps. asserted 'major election fraud'

Republicans on November 10 had filed a lawsuit with Georgia’s chief elections officer asking ballots to be “fully hand-counted” to ensure election integrity and rule out “fraud”. The request was made after the Associated Press declared Biden the projected winner who was leading in the state with a razor-thin margin. However, in a letter dispatched by US Rep. Doug Collins, President Donald Trump’s campaign lead for the recount team in Georgia, and state Republican Party Chairman David Shafer, Trump’s Republican party asserted that there was a “major election fraud”. Trump had had a sweeping victory in Georgia in 2016 elections as he had defeated Democratic contender Hillary Clinton with significant margin despite no election campaign in the state. 

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