US Election Votes In Georgia Will Be Recounted By Hand

Photo illustration (digital element / Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Georgia will recount all ballots in the United States (US) Election. The count will be done manually by hand.

The top state election official has called the recount a huge task that must be completed by November 20. This calculation, however, is important.

The Democratic Party candidate, Joe Biden, on Saturday, November 7, was declared the winner of the electoral vote by obtaining 290 votes. Meanwhile, the incumbent, US President Donald Trump, received only 217 votes.

Pennsylvania took the lead after four tense days of tallying votes delayed by a surge in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic. If you add Georgia, Biden's winning margin will increase.

The Trump camp refuses to admit defeat. The Trump camp thinks the vote was marred by fraud. The vote count in Georgia showed Biden ahead of Trump with only 14,101 votes out of an estimated five million votes across the state.

By a very small margin, a recount is needed, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told a news conference. "We really have to do the recount by hand because the margins are so close," said Raffensperger. "We want to start this process before the week ends ... A lot of people will be working overtime over the next few weeks."

Officers will work in pairs to sort through the pile of ballot papers and count them under the supervision of observers from both political parties, said Raffensperger. The stack will include ballots awarded in person and by mail, he said.

"That's what's going to happen, and we're going to count everything. It's a big process," he said.

If done all the time, the officers thus counted 23 thousand ballots in one hour in nine days, before the deadline for certifying the results.

A study by the non-partisan Fair Vote group found that of 31 statewide recounts between 2000 and 2019, only three had their results changed.

The tally results more often show that the winner got a few extra votes. On average, the count changed by 0.024 percent, according to Fair Vote. That figure represents a much smaller margin than Trump needs. Biden currently leads Trump in Georgia with 49.5 per cent to 49.2 per cent of the vote.

Two Georgia US senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both Republicans, on Monday asked Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, to resign over running the presidential election in Georgia. However, they show no evidence of fraud.