Washington-SANA
The authorities in the US state of Georgia announced that the manual recount of voters in the presidential elections that took place on the third of this month confirmed the victory of Democrat Joe Biden over outgoing Republican President Donald Trump.
"The review confirmed that the original automatic count accurately reflects the winner in the elections," AFP quoted state affairs minister Brad Ravensberger in a statement.
With this, Biden officially becomes the first Democratic candidate to win a presidential election in this southern state in nearly three decades, despite Trump's claims that the election was marred by widespread fraud.
The result of the automatic vote count showed that Biden defeated Trump by nearly 14,000 votes.
According to the statement, the manual recount showed that the difference between Biden and Trump is in fact 12.284 votes in favor of the Democratic candidate.
In his statement, Ravensburger, the state's election minister, pointed out that the difference between the two candidates is still small, giving Trump, who refuses to acknowledge his defeat to Biden, the right to request a new manual recount.
And Georgia state laws provide for a manual vote counting process automatically if the difference is less than half a percentage point between the leading candidates, and if the difference remains within this margin, the count can be manually recounted again, but this time not automatically, but if any of the candidates requests that.
Nationwide, Biden received nearly 80 million votes, compared to just under 74 million votes for Trump.