Georgia hand tally of votes is complete, affirms Biden lead

ATLANTA -- A top Georgia election official said Thursday a hand tally of ballots cast in the presidential race has been completed, and the results affirm Democrat Joe Biden's narrow lead over Republican President Donald Trump.

The hand tally of about 5 million votes stemmed from an audit required by a new state law and wasn't in response to any suspected problems with the state's results or an official recount request. The state has until today to certify results that have been certified and submitted by counties.

The counties were supposed to finish the hand count by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the state's new voting system, said Thursday evening the audit was complete. Results were posted on the Georgia secretary of state's website.

No individual county showed a variation in margin larger than 0.73%, and the variation in margin in 103 of the state's 159 counties was less than 0.05%, Sterling said.

"Every single vote was touched by a human audit team and counted," he said. "Obviously, the audit confirms the original result of the election, namely that Joe Biden won the presidential contest in the state of Georgia."

President-elect Joe Biden, accompanied by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, speaks at The Queen theater Thursday in Wilmington, Delaware.Andrew Harnik ~ Associated Press

The results that will be certified are the totals certified by the counties, not those resulting from the audit.

Once the state certifies the election results, the losing campaign has two business days to request a recount since the margin remains within 0.5%. That recount would be done using scanners that read and tally the votes and would be paid for by the counties, the Georgia Secretary of State's Office has said.

The Associated Press has declared Joe Biden the winner in Georgia.

Biden's win of Georgia and its 16 electoral votes is a victory for Democrats who pushed to expand their electoral map through the Sun Belt.

The win by Biden pads his Electoral College margin of victory over President Donald Trump. Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election Nov. 7 after flipping Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to the Democrats' column.

Biden now has 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232.

Trump won Georgia by 5 percentage points in 2016 over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

In 2020, Democrats had focused heavily on the state, seeing it in play two years after Democrat Stacey Abrams narrowly lost the governor's race. Both of Georgia's Senate seats were on the ballot this year, further boosting the state's political profile as well as spending by outside groups seeking to influence voters. Those two races are headed to a January runoff.

Georgia hadn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992.

It was up to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to select the race to be audited, and he said the presidential race made the most sense because of its significance and the tight margin separating the candidates. Because of that small margin, Raffensperger said a full hand recount was necessary.

Votes that hadn't previously been counted were found in several counties during the audit, which required recertification of the election results in those counties.

In Floyd County, more than 2,500 ballots were discovered during the audit that hadn't previously been scanned, and the secretary of state's office had called for the firing of the county's chief elections clerk, Robert Brady. The county elections board on Thursday voted to issue a written reprimand to Brady and, because it was his second written reprimand within six months, to fire him in accordance with county policy, board member Melanie Conrad said in an email.

Several other counties found memory cards with votes that hadn't been uploaded and counted prior to the audit.