Updated Friday at 11:02 a.m.
In the early hours of Friday morning, former Vice President Joe Biden’s total vote count in Georgia surpassed President Donald Trump’s in the race for president, as a batch of mail-in ballots from Clayton County were uploaded.
Part of that county is in Georgia’s 5th Congressional District, long held by Democrat Rep. John Lewis who died in July. Georgia hasn’t elected a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992.
The Associated Press has Biden’s current delegate count at 264 and Trump’s at 214. With 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, Georgia’s 16 electoral votes could clinch it for the Democrats.
About 1,500 votes separated the two candidates in the state with fewer than 4,200 absentee votes remaining to be counted as of late Friday morning.
Counties also have provisional ballots to review and possibly add to their totals, along with absentee ballots that need to be “cured” by voters by 5 p.m. on Friday. Ballots cast before Election Day by military voters and citizens living overseas and received by 5 p.m. also will be tallied.
Under Georgia law, if the margin between Biden and Trump is under half a percentage point of difference, a recount can be requested. Gabriel Sterling, who has overseen the implementation of Georgia’s new electronic voting system, said a recount for president is “more than likely, and the people will see that the outcome will stay essentially the same.”
After each county certifies their total, the state will perform an audit before certifying the results, Sterling said. Counties must certify their results by Nov. 13 and the state must certify the results by Nov. 20.
Georgia Democrats have been narrowing margins in the state for the last decade. In 2016 Trump won Georgia by 5 points. In 2018, Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams lost by just under 55,000 votes.
“What we can do this year, is something people didn’t believe we could do 10 years ago,” said Abrams to a rally for Senator Kamala Harris days before the election.
“Ten years ago when we lost every statewide office, they told us we were done. When we didn’t win elections in 2012 and 2016. When we did take the White House, they said it’s just a mirage.”
“Everybody get it done this time,” she urged the crowd. “We’re going to get it done.”
Tharon Johnson is a senior advisor to the Biden campaign and Democratic strategist.
“I’ve always said that Georgia is a democratic state if you look at us demographically. Unfortunately when it comes to electoral outcomes we’ve not been able to pull it off,” he said in an interview before the election.
The states’ all-time high voter registration numbers and early vote turnout, and the attention the state received from the Biden campaign’s surrogates “definitely gives me a great deal of optimism that we’re going to be victorious,” he predicted.
In the week before the election, Georgia saw visits from Biden, his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama, the most attention it has received from a Democratic presidential campaign in a generation.
Johnson said the progress the state has made started to build before Abrams ran for governor.
“Now in 2020, all those things, that 18 years of hard work has given us the opportunity to be at this moment where we think we will win.”
With margins so narrow, Democrats and Republicans along with voting advocacy groups are scrambling to encourage people to fix flaws in already submitted ballots before Friday’s deadline to ensure they are counted.
Donald Trump Jr. spoke Thursday evening at an event in Atlanta, along with several Georgia elected officials, and decried the process.
Earlier in the day, roughly a hundred Trump supporters gathered outside State Farm Arena where counting was taking place. They carried signs that read, “Foolton County=Fraud” and chanted “God bless Trump” and “Stop the steal.” Several Atlanta police officers monitored the scene.
On Thursday, Chatham County Judge James Bass dismissed a lawsuit by the Georgia Republican Party and the Trump campaign that raised concerns about 53 absentee ballots; county officials testified that all had been received on time.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
