A process of counting by hand the votes cast in the recent presidential election has been launched in the 159 counties of the state of Georgia.
The tally is being conducted because the law requires that one of the election races must be checked by hand in order to ascertain that "the machines counted the ballots accurately", as AP reported it and not because of "any suspected problems with the results".
Having selected the presidential race for the purpose of this audit, Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State for Georgia, noted that the tight margin there – Biden leading Trump by 14,000 votes – necessitates a full hand count.
The county election officials have been instructed to complete the audit by 11:59pm Wednesday, with the deadline for the state to certify the results being Friday, 20 November.
Although Raffensperger put himself in quarantine as a precaution after his wife tested positive for coronavirus earlier this week, his deputy, Jordan Fuchs, told AP that it will not affect the audit, and that the secretary already tested negative for the virus.
During the audit, the election staffers are going to divide batches of paper ballots into piles for each candidate, in order then to count the resulting piles by hand, Fuchs said.
According to AP, the audit is a new requirement that was introduced in a 2019 law "that also provided guidelines that the state used to purchase a new election system from Dominion Voting Systems for more than $100 million".
Despite the absence of a mandatory recount in Georgia, state law does provide such an option to the trailing candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points, with Biden's lead being 0.28 percentage points as of Thursday afternoon, the media outlet adds.
And as Raffensperger explained, the losing campaign can request such a recount which would be performed using "scanners that read and tally the votes", after the results of the aforementioned audit are certified.
