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Georgia still has at least 200,000 ballots left to be counted, which a state official said Wednesday morning he hoped to have finished by the end of the night.
Speaking to reporters during a press briefing in the must-win state, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger made the statement just after pledging “that every legal vote in Georgia will count.”
“We have about 200,000 ballots left to be counted. With the absentee ballot process, and there are also about 40,000 to 50,000 early votes that need to be counted. Every legal vote will be counted. We’re saying that every legal ballot will be counted in Georgia because that’s our process,” Raffensperger said.
Raffensperger went on to say that the state had between 40,000 and 50,000 early votes left to count, but did not clarify whether those were separate from the 200,000 he had mentioned just before.
Asked during his presser whether it was realistic to be able to count all 200,000 accurately before the end of the night, the secretary of state said he believed so.
If officials were not able to get the job done by Wednesday evening, Raffensperger said, he hoped to be able to tell the American public who was ahead in the state depending on how far along they were.
Just after mentioning how his team was “pushing really hard for” the state to release its findings by the end of the night, Raffensperger said he hoped to at least be able to get the remaining ballots down to such a low number that “there is no question of who actually the winner is.”
Georgia, with 16 electoral votes, has become one of the most talked-about states in this presidential cycle, with Democrats hoping to flip the long-red state to blue.
State election officials stopped counting ballots Tuesday night but resumed Wednesday morning. There is no order to what type of ballot had to be counted first.
As of Wednesday morning, the race remains too close to call, though President Trump holds a slight lead over former Vice President Joe Biden.
The 2020 election was upended by the coronavirus pandemic, resulting in more ballots than ever being cast by mail.
Each of the 50 states has its own set of complex election laws — many of which have been taken up in courts across the country as states grapple with a surge of mail-in voting for the first time.




