Following very tight results in the race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the state of Georgia has ordered a hand recount in all counties per a 2019 state law. How likely is it to change the results?
Summary
Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, announced Wednesday the entire state will conduct a hand recount of ballots for the presidential election.
- Biden currently leads Trump by roughly 14,000 votes in Georgia, which cast almost 5 million votes in the presidential race.
- The hand recount order is the result of a 2019 Georgia law that requires “audits” that compares hand examination of ballots to results produced by counting equipment. The procedure allows for random sampling, the size of which gets larger as the margin between two candidates is smaller.
- Raffensperger said Wednesday the margin between Biden and Trump is small enough to mandate a hand recount of all ballots.
- Earlier in the week, the Trump campaign wrote to the Georgia Secretary of State, requesting a hand recount, which Raffensperger emphasized was not the cause of the order.
- Democrat officials in the state criticized Raffensperger, saying he’s buckling to pressure from Trump.
- US Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both of whom will be on the ballot in run-off elections to retain their seats, called for Raffensperger’s resignation, saying he “failed the people of Georgia” in how he conducted the election. Raffensperger dismissed their demand.
- One Georgia county elections chief said this year’s election could cost the county as much as $750,000, more than four times what was budgeted.
- The Daily Beast led their reporting of the recount by directly tying the Trump campaign’s request to Raffensperger’s order while failing to appropriately acknowledge Georgia law requiring it.
- Steve Kornacki on MSNBC said of Biden’s Georgia recount position: “If you’re a candidate going into a recount with a pad of over 10,000 votes, that’s usually a pretty good place to be.”
- Vice wrote the recount likely will not meet the state’s certification deadline and argued it will fuel “Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him.”
- The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board wrote that a full hand recount of the ballots in Georgia may actually help reassure Georgians and the American people about the election results.
- In its reporting of the situation in Georgia, The Daily Caller reported on the Trump campaign’s allegations of voter rolls containing deceased Georgians, but said the campaign “provided no evidence that was the case.”
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© Dallas Gerber, 2020
