Election officials in Georgia announced a recount on Friday after the presidential race was deemed “too close to call” in that state.
Joe Biden overtook Donald Trump in Georgia, historically a Republican stronghold, at around 4.30am ET to secure a lead of 1,579 votes.
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Trump and Biden were locked in a tight contest on Friday, with the Democrat edging ahead, to get the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. For Trump, Georgia is a state he must win.
But with such a razor-thin margin, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said ballots will undergo a recount.
“Right now, Georgia remains too close to call. Of approximately 5m votes cast, we’ll have a margin of a few thousand,” he said in a press conference. He added: “With a margin that small, there will be a recount in Georgia.”
If Biden goes on to win Georgia, it would mark a major victory for the Democrats – and a huge upset for the Republicans – in a state that has been reliably Republican for decades.
The last time a Democratic presidential nominee won in the state was Bill Clinton in 1992. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Georgia by five percentage points.
Raffensperger acknowledged that Georgia’s result has “huge implications for the entire country” and officials said the unofficial tally could be completed by the end of the weekend.
He added: “The stakes are high and emotions are high on all sides. We will not let those debates distract us from our work. We will get it right, and we will defend the integrity of our elections.”
Georgia does not run automatic recounts, but candidates can request them if the margin is within 0.5%.
The announcement of a recount came after a judge dismissed a lawsuit from the Trump campaign over the state’s handling of absentee ballots in Chatham county.
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Matt Morgan, general counsel for the Trump campaign, said on Friday: “Georgia is headed for a recount, where we are confident we will find ballots improperly harvested, and where President Trump will ultimately prevail.”
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, dismissed allegations of fraud, saying: “We’re not seeing any widespread irregularities.”
Sterling said that 4,169 ballots, most of which were absentee, were left to be counted from four counties, including Gwinnett county, which includes Atlanta suburbs and in recent years has shifted towards Democrats.
The state also has an unknown quantity of military and overseas ballots and an unknown number of provisional ballots to be “cured”.
Biden’s strength in Georgia is the result of strong turnout among Black voters in the Atlanta suburbs, which have become younger and increasingly diverse.
The Black Voters Matter Fund, a non-profit that advocates for increasing voter registration and access, hailed the impact of Black voters in Georgia, who they said “saved the election”.
They said more than a million Black voters cast their ballots early in the state – exceeding 2016 numbers – and reported a “surge” in registration and turnout among young Black voters.
Co-founders LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright said: “A new south is rising, and Georgia is the beacon … Georgia is at the epicenter of this country right now and we are claiming victory.”
It is also a product of the work of figures such Stacey Abrams, who since losing the state’s 2018 race for governor has thrown her efforts into Fair Fight, an organization she founded that focuses on combating voter suppression.
The recount could also have significant implications for the fight for control of the US Senate, with one – possibly two – Senate races heading for a runoff.
According to electoral research by the Associated Press, there have been at least 31 statewide recounts since 2000, of which three changed the outcome of an election. But in those the initial margins were even slimmer – in the low hundreds rather than thousands.
Many analysts believe Georgia’s shift to becoming a swing state is almost inevitable – an assessment that is reflected in the energies invested into the state by the Biden campaign.
In the final weeks before the election, Biden, his running mate Senator Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama have all paid visits. Trump has also rallied there.
“Can you believe it? Two days from now, we’re going to win this state again and we’re going to win four more great years in the White House,” Trump told supporters in the Georgia city of Rome on Sunday.
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