Georgia‘s Secretary of State on Friday said there will be a recount there no matter what the outcome is because the margin is so tight.
There are still 5,500 votes outstanding in Georgia and 8,000 mail-ins.
Of the 5million that have already been counted, Trump and Biden are neck-and-neck with 49.4% of the vote each.
Biden has a tiny lead of just 1,500 votes.
Whatever happens now, it will be too close a race for there not to be an automatic recount, Brad Raffensperger said at a press conference.
It does not delay the election result if Biden wins Pennsylvania, which he is poised to do after taking the lead from Trump. That result is expected by the end of the day.
He can also still win before a Georgia recount if he wins Nevada and Arizona, where he also holds leads.
‘As of 10am, there were a little under 5,500 votes to be counted. There are 8.890 military ballots outstanding that will be counted if they are returned by the close of business today. Right now Georgia remains too close to call. We’ll have a margin of a few thousand,’ Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said.
‘The focus of our office for now remains on making sure that every legal vote is counted accurately. We can begin to look towards our next steps. With a margin that small, there will be a recount in Georgia.’
Georgia carries 16 electoral college votes. If Biden claims it today along with any other state, he will win the Presidency.
Trump would have to win every state left on the field to get a second term and Biden is leading everywhere.
Biden took a crucial lead in Pennsylvania on Friday morning. If he wins the state today, he will have won the White House.
Trump, however, is refusing to accept the result and is claiming election fraud all-round.
In one Georgia county, there was a corrupt memory card on one scanner which meant 400 had to be recounted.
Officials in some counties are also using paper ballots for the first time in 20 years because they voted earlier this year that machine voting was not secretive enough. They are then scanning all of the paper votes which is an ‘arduous’ process.
Speaking earlier on Thursday, Georgia’s Voting System Implementation Manager, Gabriel Sterling, said there was nothing suspicious or strange about the process, but that elections were never normally so close so it doesn’t always have to come down to an official count.
‘We can’t know how long the process will take. We hope to have clarity but “done” is a very relative term at this point.
‘As we’ve been stating for weeks and months, it’s going to take time. The effort here is to make sure everybody’s legal vote is counted properly.
‘The issue we have in Georgia is it’s a close vote. There’s other states that have more votes to count than we do but it’s a wide margin so nobody cares,’ Sterling said.