How a Ballot Recount in Georgia Would Work

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Friday that a ballot recount will take place in his state due to the small gap that currently exists between the number of votes Georgians cast for President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The recount means Americans likely will not know for sure which candidate won Georgia in the next couple of weeks, though Raffensperger said during a news conference that he hopes the outcome will be clear by the end of November.

Neither candidate had the 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency by Friday. Georgia—a state with 16 electoral votes that have gone to the Republican presidential candidate every election since 1992—became an unexpected battleground during this election cycle, with Trump and Biden nearly deadlocked by Friday evening.

Georgia's Voting System Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling told reporters that the margin between Trump and Biden was only 1,585 votes as of 3 p.m. local time on Friday, a margin that had widened to over 4,000 votes three hours later.

Just over 8,000 ballots were waiting to be counted statewide by Friday morning, but Raffensperger said there were also more than 8,000 military ballots that could be received in time for election officials to count them. So long as the military ballots were postmarked by Election Day and received by Friday, they could be counted, Sterling said.

Once all of the ballots have been tallied, counties must certify their election results and submit them to state officials so that the state can go through its own certification process. Sterling said the deadline for the state's certification is November 20, though he added that election officials are hopeful they will be able to certify the results sooner. Once the state has done so, the losing candidate is then able to request a recount.

"A recount cannot be requested until the election is certified," Sterling said. "At that point, whomever comes in second, whether it be President Trump or Vice President Biden, either one of them—whoever's in second place can request that recount if it's within half a percent."

Sterling said it is hard to predict how long a recount would take because Georgia has never done a statewide recount under its current system. "We are hoping it would be a week, but we have no way of actually knowing that at this point," Sterling said, adding that additional delays are possible if lawsuits are thrown into the mix.

At least 31 statewide recounts have taken place since the turn of the century, the Associated Press reported. Those recounts did not find significant discrepancies in the votes cast, although three did trigger a change in the election outcome, according to the AP.

During the last presidential election, a third-party candidate requested a recount in Wisconsin, a state that has already been called for Biden this year and in which Trump's campaign has said it is considering requesting a recount. That 2016 recount, which was requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, resulted in 131 more votes added to Trump's Wisconsin tally, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.

A recount for a Georgia judicial race in 2004 also did not result in a significant change, according to Courier Newsroom. In that recount, only 15 votes flipped between the candidates.

Perhaps the most famous recount in recent memory was the Florida recount in 2000, which started with news networks retracting their initial calls for the state and Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore requesting recounts in some counties. In that instance, the case ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, the winner.

Twenty years later, Georgia is shaping up to be another state in which the final tallies could be extremely close. The losing candidate will have two days after the state certifies its initial results to request a recount, Raffensperger said.

Newsweek reached out to the Trump and Biden campaigns for comment, but did not receive a response in time for publication.