US President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia has been confirmed by a recount, as legal efforts by Donald Trump’s allies to challenge his defeat were dismissed in three states.
The Democrat beat his Republican rival in Georgia by 12,284 votes, according to the audit required by state law.
Mr Biden said he was confident Mr Trump knew he was not going to win and had shown “incredible irresponsibility”.
The Democrat is set to take office in January as the 46th US president.
Mr Biden’s victory margin in the public vote overall stands at more than 5.9 million. His victory in the US Electoral College system, which determines who becomes president, is projected to be 306 to 232.
On Thursday, Georgia‘s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, said the hand audit of ballots had not altered Mr Biden’s victory in the state.
“Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Mr Raffensberger said in a statement.
“This is a credit to the hard work of our county and local elections officials who moved quickly to undertake and complete such a momentous task in a short period of time.”
The recount found the highest error rate in any county was 0.73% and the overall margin between Mr Biden and Mr Trump remained at under 0.5%. The results will be certified on Friday.
Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis said the audit had gone “exactly as we expected” because, she said without evidence, the state had recounted illegal ballots.
But Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who serves as Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, told CNN on Thursday: “One of the big complaints is these machines somehow flipped votes or changed votes or did stuff. They didn’t, at least not in Georgia. We proved it.”
During the audit this week, nearly 6,000 untallied votes were found – paring back Mr Biden’s lead slightly – but they were the result of human error and not fraud, Mr Sterling has said.
Officials in Floyd County have fired their election manager over the matter, local media reported on Thursday.
In a matter of hours on Thursday, Mr Trump’s allies were dealt legal setbacks in Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Republicans lost their final lawsuit in Georgia as a court rejected their effort to block the results’ certification, which is due to happen on Friday. The judge who dismissed the case was appointed by Mr Trump last year.
In Arizona, a judge rejected a lawsuit filed last week by the state Republican Party seeking a new audit of ballots in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix – the state capital and largest city.
In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign lost their bid in state court to throw out more than 2,000 postal ballots.
At a Thursday briefing, Mr Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani continued to lay out unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and accusations of electoral fraud.
He railed against the reporting of his team’s legal challenges, saying the media had shown an “irrational pathological hatred for the president”.
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