US Elections: Biden wins Georgia in manual ballot audit
Another dent for Trump as Biden wins Georgia recount
To no avail of Trump’s litigation team’s legal challenges, US President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in battleground state of Georgia has been ascertained by a recount. The Democrat outshined his Republican rival in Georgia by 12,284 votes after an audit mandated by state law. Biden said he was confident that his Republican rival was going to lose and had shown “incredible irresponsibility”. The former Obama deputy is due to take office in Jan as 46th US President.
Biden has a lead of 5.9mn votes in popular vote. His victory in the US Electoral College system is projected to be 306-232.
The recount in Georgia
Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, on Thursday said the manual audit of ballots had not given the Democrat an edge in the state. “Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Mr. Raffensberger 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.”
According to the hand audit of ballot, the highest error rate in any county was 0.73 percent and the overall margin between Biden and Trump was under 0.5 percent. The results will be formally confirmed on Friday. Jenna Ellis, Trump campaign senior legal adviser said the audit had gone “exactly as we expected” because, she said in the absence of evidence, the state had recounted tempered ballots making no difference in the outcome.
Trump’s defeat confirmed in Georgia recount
However, Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who serves as Georgia’s voting system implementation manager on Thursday, told CNN: “One of the big complaints is these machines somehow flipped votes or changed votes or did stuff. They didn’t, at least not in Georgia. We proved it.”
During this week review, nearly 6,000 untallied ballots were detected – trimming Biden’s lead slightly – but they were counted as human error and not voter fraud, Sterling said. Officials in Floyd County have fired their election manager over the irregularities on Thursday. Democrats have not been able to woo Georgian voters since Bill Clinton won the public vote in 1992.
How did Biden Respond?
The President-elect was speaking after a virtual meeting with governors, fellow Democrats and GOP leaders about the COVID-19 pandemic in country. When asked about Trump’s failure to accept the defeat, Biden said the Republican was sending “incredibly damaging messages… to the rest of the world about how democracy functions” and that he would be remembered “as being one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history”.
“It’s hard to fathom how this man thinks,” he continued, adding: “It’s just outrageous what he’s doing.”
About the election result, the Democratic president-elect said: “The vast majority of people believe it is legitimate.”
