Cristian Carlos. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
With an advance of 99% of votes counted, where the candidate for the U.S. presidency for the Democratic Party, Joe Biden led his Republican counterpart, Donald Trump, by just 1,579 votes early this morning, the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, announced to the media that it is necessary to restart the counting of the ballots.
In the early hours of Friday morning, November 6th, the state of Georgia turned blue, as Biden had snatched the state of Georgia from Trump, which has 16 electoral votes; had it continued with a clear upward trend for the Democrat, he would have been only 1 electoral vote away from winning the race.
This situation reverses the speculation that Joe Biden could reach 269 electoral votes at the end of the vote count at the polls in Georgia, which keeps Biden with 253 electoral votes of the 270 to be proclaimed winner in the presidential election.
"As of 10 a.m. local time, we have 5,500 votes still to be counted in Gwinnett, Floyd, Cherokee and DeKalb counties, and we still have Army voters still to come in," Raffensperger said. "The margin is so close between one candidate and the other that there will likely be a recount in Georgia. We know that the recount has implications not only for our state, but for the entire nation.
He recalled that in this electoral process, mainly in the state of Georgia "there is much at stake as much as there is a heated debate on both sides," referring to both Trump and Biden; however, he stressed that he will not allow those clashes to distract his work to count the votes and then declare a winner. "We will defend the integrity of our electoral process with everything," he said.
The Georgia secretary of state stressed that the electoral process is a process that is open to public opinion as well as transparent. "If any public figure dares to question it, we will use any procedure to defend the integrity of the vote of every person in Georgia," he concluded.
Later, Gabriel Sterling, head of Georgia's canvassing system, admitted an error in the counting of absentee ballots, which were added to the initial Nov. 3 vote count. He noted that Georgia will provide election results "by the end of this weekend."
