“Georgia manual recount won’t replace official election results”

AJC:

Georgia election officials said Tuesday they no longer intend to make the results of the state’s manual recount the official tally in the presidential race, with a couple of exceptions.

The decision leaves little chance for election results to change much after the recount concludes Wednesday. Joe Biden led President Donald Trump by 14,000 votes, according to unofficial results.

But some votes that weren’t originally counted will be added to the state’s totals. Election officials in Floyd and Fayette counties discovered ballots they hadn’t previously been tabulated, and those votes will be included in final counts. After accounting for those ballots, Biden’s lead will shrink to about 13,000 votes.

The change in how the recount is handled came after lawyers for the secretary of state’s office reviewed Georgia law and concluded that the new hand count shouldn’t replace the original machine count of scanned ballots, said Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system manager.

MORE:

Election workers discovered almost 2,800 previously uncounted ballots Tuesday, the second time this week that Georgia’s recount revealed that election officials in Republican-leaning counties had missed some ballots.

The finding, which came as Georgia’s manual recount neared completion Wednesday, narrowed Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump to 12,929, according to the secretary of state’s office.

The missing votes weren’t entirely unexpected in Fayette and Floyd counties. Both counties had reported more ballots cast than votes counted, indicating that they might have overlooked some ballots. There didn’t appear to be any other counties with vote-counting discrepancies, according to state election data.

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