Georgia Secretary of State Announces Hand Recount of Presidential Race
ATLANTA – Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced Wednesday that the state will conduct a hand recount of all ballots cast in last week’s presidential contest.
The announcement came during a news conference at which Raffensperger continued to deflect pressure from fellow Georgia Republicans who made unsubstantiated claims of voting irregularities in the race.
On Monday, Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both of whom now face January runoff elections, called for his resignation and claimed the secretary had mismanaged all of the state’s elections.
On Wednesday, Raffensperger said the manual hand recount “will help build confidence” in the outcome of the race, in which President-elect Joe Biden maintains a slim, 14,112 vote lead over President Trump.
“It will be an audit, a recount and a recanvas all at once,” Raffensperger said at the news conference. “It will be a heavy lift.”
The secretary has already flatly rejected Loeffler and Perdue’s demands for resignation, telling reporters that the voters of Georgia had hired him, “and the voters will be the ones to fire me.”
“As secretary of state, I’ll continue to fight every day to ensure fair elections in Georgia, that every legal vote counts, and that illegal votes don’t count,” he said.
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