1 month ago
1 

 Joe Biden.

 
Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The US presidential election battleground state of Georgia was expected on Thursday to affirm Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump after a painstaking recount, as Trump's re-election campaign said it was withdrawing a lawsuit in Michigan.
The official in charge of implementing Georgia's voting systems, Gabriel Sterling, told Fox News the state's audit and recount were nearly complete and on track to verify Biden's advantage. He called accusations of voter irregularities "wild mischaracterizations."
"The good part was: the audit did its job" in finding a few small batches of uncounted votes that were being tallied that morning, he said. "The recount is going great."
In the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the winner of the election, Biden, a Democrat, has captured 306 electoral votes to Republican Trump's 232, well ahead of the 270 needed for victory. The winner in each state is awarded that state's electoral votes, a number roughly proportional to the population.
Trump's campaign has filed lawsuits in a number of states with scant success so far. Those legal motions, sprinkled with factual errors, have been dismissed by Biden's campaign as "theatrics."
Withdrawing
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said on Thursday the campaign was withdrawing its lawsuit challenging the vote results in Michigan, where this week Biden was certified as the winner in a tangled series of events.
Two Republican members of the Wayne County board of canvassers on Tuesday initially voted to block certification of the vote before reversing their decision after angry public reaction.
But both then signed affidavits on Wednesday seeking to cancel their confirmation of Biden's win, saying they had changed their positions under pressure. A spokesman for the Michigan secretary of state's office said the after-the-fact statement did not stop the ballots from being certified.
One of the two, Monica Palmer, on Thursday confirmed by text message to Reuters that Trump had called her to check in after certification of the vote.
Trump has a dwindling number of options to overturn the results of an election in which Biden won 5.8 million more votes nationwide. Biden is due to be sworn in on 20 January.

 
 
English (United States)