Though circumstances do not seem to be moving in the president’s favor in recounts, the final result is still headed for the courts. An ultimate decision will be made there. Until then, two states are dealing with myriad recount issues.

Newsmax: “Georgia counties prepare for a hand tally of the presidential race, the state’s top elections official plans to quarantine after his wife tested positive for the coronavirus, his office said Thursday. An audit of one race is required before election results are certified by the state, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced Wednesday that he had selected the presidential race. Because of the tight margin in that race — Democrat Joe Biden leads Republican President Trump by about 14,000 votes — Raffensperger said the audit would result in a full hand recount.”

“The point of the audit is to show the machines counted the ballots fairly,” said Gabriel Sterling, who directed the state’s new voting system. “Even before the Trump campaign was talking about the possibility of a recount or recanvassing, we knew that there was a specific purpose for an audit in the law. That specific purpose was to instill confidence in the outcome of that election,” Sterling told a news conference Thursday.

Georgia will count each ballot by hand, Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said. Sterling said the totals found in the audit will be  different than numbers previously reported by the counties. The results of the new count from the audit is what will be certified, he said. He expects the result to stay the same. Others do not, including Georgia’s two US Senators, who have criticized the handling of the state’s entire election process. Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia has confidence in the recount.

Full audits, like what is happening in Georgia, will strengthen voter confidence.https://t.co/o5wd70rjg2

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) November 12, 2020

Newsmax: “Officials in the election battleground state of Pennsylvania on Thursday asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump’s campaign seeking to prevent the state from certifying its results in the vote for president. In court filings in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, lawyers for the Pennsylvania secretary of state and seven of the state’s counties said the case made vague and unsupported allegations ‘on the basis of repeatedly-rejected legal theories and no evidence…This Court should see this lawsuit for what it is: a transparent and premeditated attack on our electoral system that broadly seeks to disenfranchise all Pennsylvania voters who legally cast ballots in this election.’ “

President Trump’s campaign said the “Democrat-majority counties” did not give Republican election observers an opportunity to review the processing of mail-in ballots, placed observers far away from the count of votes, and permitted mail-in voters whose ballots were deficient to cast provisional ballots. Republican attorneys say this was a blatant flouting of Pennsylvania election rules. In Philadelphia alone there is proof of massive corruption of the process. Thus, in both states these battles are far from over.

This piece was written by David Kamioner on November 13, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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