U.S. President-elect Joe Biden was confirmed as Georgia's winner on Thursday after the state completed a hand audit of ballots, according to a statement from Georgia's state secretary.
Final audit results revealed that by 12,284 votes, Biden beat incumbent President Donald Trump. According to CNN, the amount is a little lower than the pre-audit results.
In a statement, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that the audit reaffirmed that the votes had been correctly counted. This is a testament to the hard work of our county and local election officials, who have moved rapidly in a short period of time to tackle and complete such a momentous mission," he said."
"The audit confirmed that the original machine count accurately portrayed the winner of the election," Raffensperger said.
In a tweet, Jaclyn Rothenberg, communications director of the Biden campaign for Georgia, said that the audit "just reaffirmed what we already knew." "Voters in Georgia chose Joe Biden as their next president," she said. Under "unprecedented circumstances," Rothenberg thanked election officials for completing the recount.
Reuters announced that Georgia had started the audit after unofficial results showed Biden leading in the state with around 14,000 votes.
According to The Guardian, Biden is the first Democrat to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1996. There are 16 electoral college votes in the province. As compared to Trump's count of 232, Biden is expected to win 306 electoral votes.
The outgoing US president declined to commit Biden to a peaceful transition of power and filed multiple lawsuits to contest the results of the election. He has continued to say that the Democrats had a multi-state plot to stop him from winning a second term. Polling officials have dismissed Trump's repeated allegations of electoral fraud.
Since remembering for the first time that Biden had won the presidential race, Trump backtracked last week. Once again he said the election was rigged. "Only in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA did he win," Trump tweeted. "I accept NOTHING! We've got to go a long way. This ELECTION was RIGGED!”. Like several others, the president's tweet was flagged by a microblogging platform, claiming election fraud.
