ATLANTA, Georgia, November 11, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Georgia’s Secretary of State has announced that there will be a “hand recount” of the ballots in the Peach State.
BREAKING: Georgia Secretary of State announced that they will conduct a ‘Hand Recount’ of the presidential race. pic.twitter.com/9JAEmfKW5d
— ThePoliticalInsider (@TPInsidr) November 11, 2020
With 99% of polls reporting, President Donald Trump has 49.2% of the state’s votes, while Joe Biden has 49.5%. Fewer than 15,000 votes separate the two candidates.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the hand recount this morning at a press conference.
“With the margin being so close, it requires a full, by hand recount in each county. This will help build confidence. It will be an audit, a recount, and a recanvas all at once,” he said.
“It will be a heavy lift, but we will work with the counties to get this done in time for a state certification,” he continued.
Election officers will divide paper ballots in batches for each candidate before running them separately through machines to count the numbers. Once the results are certified, the losing side can request an additional machine count.
Raffensperger expects the hand recount to be finished by November 20. States are required to finalize their results by December 8.
Democrats sued the state of Georgia in August to extend the deadline for mail-in ballots to be received and counted, citing the “pandemic” as a justification. U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross in Atlanta, an Obama appointee, extended the deadline in Georgia three days.
Georgia law also requires the state to notify a voter if they have to reject their mail-in ballot due to a missing or defective signature, a lack of proper identification, or the like. With the new three-day timeframe involved, such voters can now “cure” their ballots within this period.
Therefore, with a prepared initiative, the Georgia Democrat Party trained and sent out activists to “cure” ballots that had been rejected on Election Day, through Friday, according to Kyle Olson of Breitbart.
But they only wanted to identify and assist Democrat voters for this exercise. “If an activist visits the home of a voter who said they cast a ballot for a Republican,” Olson reported, volunteers were instructed to “leave and not assist them.”
LifeSiteNews’ Patrick Delaney contributed to this report