Team Trump is hurling accusations as Georgia recount stays on track to confirm Biden's win

Donald Trump’s refusal to admit that he lost fair and square has Georgia in the middle of the largest hand recount ever in the United States. President-elect Joe Biden won the state by 14,000 votes, a much larger number than is likely to change in a recount. So far, 48 counties have finished counting, with only very minor changes. Four of the counties didn’t find even a single vote changed.

The state has a deadline of 11:59 PM Wednesday for finishing the recount, which is being done county by county—with the counties stuck absorbing the cost. In DeKalb County, that cost will be $180,000. If we were talking about a couple hundred votes statewide, it would be worth spending the money, because counting every vote is important. But of 31 statewide recounts conducted in the U.S. between 2000 and 2019, just three changed the results of an election. The most famous case, of course, put Al Franken in the Senate after a recount moved him from trailing by 215 votes to winning by 225. Those numbers, though, show how big Biden’s 14,000-vote lead is when it comes to the possibility of a recount changing the result.

Because the recount—ordered by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in exercise of his responsibility to audit a race after every general election—does not look likely to change the result, Trump is predictably crapping all over it, calling it a “Fake recount” that “means nothing.” His campaign’s efforts to prove that dead people voted en masse have meanwhile fallen through, like most of his other legal challenges. They provided four examples of supposedly dead people who supposedly voted, only to have even such minor claims fall through when, for instance, it turned out that their claim that the late James E. Blalock had died was a result of Blalock’s widow voting under the name Mrs. James E. Blalock. Whoops.

Raffensperger continues to stand up to pressure from other Georgia Republicans, pushing back hard on attacks on the integrity of the election he conducted. The question now, with the recount on track to finish by Wednesday night’s deadline, is what Gov. Brian Kemp will do when the hand recount concludes and Trump isn’t satisfied. How far will Kemp allow Trump to delay, and how many rules will he bend or break to help Trump?

Source: Daily Kos