Georgia announces complete hand recount of the presidential race

ATLANTA —  Georgia’s secretary of state has announced a full hand recount of the presidential race.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said at a news conference Wednesday that his office wants the process to begin by the end of the week and he expects it to take until Nov. 20.

President-elect Joe Biden leads President Trump by about 14,000 votes out of nearly 5 million votes counted in the state. Nearly all ballots have been counted, though counties have until Friday to certify their results.

After results from the hand recount are certified, the losing campaign can request another recount, which would be performed by machine, Raffensperger said.

There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law provides that option to a trailing candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 of a percentage point. Biden’s lead stood at 0.28 of a percentage point as of Wednesday morning.

The move comes as Republicans are making more demands of Georgia’s chief elections officer as they seek to overturn Democrat Biden’s lead in the state.

GOP U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, who’s leading Trump’s recount team in Georgia, and state Republican Party Chairman David Shafer sent a letter to Raffensperger — a fellow Republican — Tuesday requesting that he order the hand recount before certifying the results.

A day earlier, Republican U.S. Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler called for Raffensperger’s resignation, claiming he ran the election poorly but citing no specific incidents of wrongdoing. Perdue will face Democrat Jon Ossoff and Loeffler will face Democrat Raphael Warnock in Jan. 5 runoffs that will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.

Raffensperger dismissed the calls to step down and defended how his office conducted the election. His office has refuted a number of claims made by Trump supporters.

“The process of reporting results has been orderly and followed the law,” Raffensperger said in a statement Monday. “Where there have been specific allegations of illegal voting, my office has dispatched investigators.”

“This is not about anything but a fair process and election,” Collins said in an interview with the Associated Press. “This is not about sour grapes. It’s not about anything else. It’s just about saying, let’s restore the integrity, because we’ve got more elections here in Georgia in a very short time.”

Collins and Shafer also requested that election officials recanvass the results for Perdue’s Senate seat and a state Public Service Commission seat held by Lauren “Bubba” McDonald. The AP called a runoff in Perdue’s race and hasn’t made a call yet in McDonald’s race, where the Republican leads but is short of reaching a majority of votes, as required by Georgia law.

Additionally, Collins and Shafer asked Raffensperger to verify the validity of signatures on 1.4 million mailed-in ballots and confirm the ballots include the proper notations, check in-person and mail-in ballots to make sure no one cast one of each, check that no one who’s not eligible was able to vote, and trace the ballots’ chain of custody to confirm that they were legally cast.

There is no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election aside from a few ballots, as is typical. In fact, election officials from both political parties have stated publicly that the election went well, and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities.

The issues Trump’s campaign and its allies have pointed to are typical in every election: problems with signatures, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost. With Biden leading Trump by wide margins in key states, none of those issues would affect the election’s outcome.

Trump’s campaign has also complained that their poll watchers were unable to scrutinize the voting process, including in Georgia’s Fulton County. Many legal challenges based on those complaints have been tossed out by judges, some within hours of filing. None of the complaints show any evidence that the election’s outcome was affected.

Cathy Cox, dean of Mercer University law school and a former Georgia secretary of state, said the election law places the burden of proof on Trump and his allies to show evidence of vote fraud.

“All I’ve heard is noise and innuendo, rumor and gossip,” said Cox, a Democrat who served as Georgia’s top elections official from 1999 until 2007. “Just throwing junk at the wall to see if somebody will buy it.”