Politics
Politics

Georgia vote count: About 4,200 absentee ballots still being tallied

Biden leads Trump by 1,557 votes
ajc.com
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This article was last updated at 1:05 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 6

About 4,200 absentee ballots remained to be counted in Georgia on Thursday after Joe Biden took a 1,096-vote lead over President Donald Trump.

Many of the uncounted absentee ballots are in Gwinnett County in metro Atlanta, where 4,800 remained to be tallied Friday morning. These figures are of ballots that arrived by the state’s deadline of 7 p.m. on Election Day.

Besides Gwinnett, absentees were pending in Laurens, Taylor and Floyd counties.

In addition, as many as 8,899 absentee ballots from military and overseas voters haven’t yet been returned to Georgia. Those ballots will be counted if they’re received by the end of the day Friday, the federal deadline for military and overseas ballots.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Friday that local election officials should focus on getting the count correct. State law gives county election officials until Nov. 13 to certify final election results.

“The focus for our office and for the county election officials for now remains on making sure that every legal vote is counted and recorded accurately,” Raffensperger, a Republican, said during a Capitol press conference.

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About the Authors

Mark Niesse is an enterprise reporter and covers elections and Georgia government for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and is considered an expert on elections and voting. Before joining the AJC, he worked for The Associated Press in Atlanta, Honolulu and Montgomery, Alabama. He also reported for The Daily Report and The Santiago Times in Chile.

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Emily Merwin DiRico has been doing information design and news application development at the AJC since she arrived as a summer intern in 2009. Her mission is to help readers understand complex data and how it affects them.

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Jennifer Peebles is a newsroom data specialist at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, helping reporters find and tell stories with government data (and sometimes documents, too).

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Isaac Sabetai is an audience specialist with the state and federal politics team. He builds data visualizations and other projects that help explain what Georgia lawmakers are doing and how the state is or isn't changing.

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