Georgia’s upcoming hand recount of nearly 5 million votes cast in the presidential race will find that there were not many errors, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Thursday.
“I believe it will be a relatively small amount,” Raffensperger, a Republican, told Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.” “I think that you will find that the machine count that we did will be fairly accurate.”
Raffensperger said the state opted to conduct a full recount, rather than a limited one because of the number of ballots that would have had to have been pulled for a recount in the tight race, which gave presumptive president-elect Joe Biden the win over President Donald Trump by just 14,045 votes.
“We would have had to pull out 1.5 million ballots anyway,” said Raffensperger. “It’s easier to pull out all 5 million and reach out to every single one of them.”
He said the ballots will be divided into stacks concerning whether voters picked Trump, Biden, or Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen, and then they’ll be counted.
There have been allegations that some votes had signatures that didn’t match what were on file or even on the envelopes, and Raffensperger admitted that there are some cases in which the ballots and envelopes are no longer together, where in others, they are still linked.
“In some cases, they are actually still together if there was a ballot adjudicated and there was a concern at the original time,” he said. “All the envelopes should be available for inspection regardless so that people can look at those. We will have an open and transparent process. We have the 5 million that gets we recounted and then we’ll have a result there.”
The state has a deadline of Nov. 20 to finish the recount, and Raffensperger said he’s certain the counties will meet that goal.
Meanwhile, there will be an accurate recount and it will be known exactly what the final count is, even if some people “may not like the results,” he said.
Raffensperger also rejected calls from incumbent Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue to step down after the two Republicans found themselves facing a recall election after failing to get the 50% of the votes in their races to win them.
“I’m not going anyplace,” he said. “I was put here by the voters. That’s the people that will decide my fate.”
Via Newsmax