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As a ballot recount in the 2020 presidential race winds down in Georgia, a voter-fraud lawsuit filed by Republican Georgia voters has been dropped at the plaintiffs’ request.
The manual recount of nearly 5 million votes in Georgia — the largest recount in U.S. history — began Friday in the state’s 159 counties and continued through the weekend, according to a Washington Post report. Workers were also checking the ballots for irregularities.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, several Atlanta metro-area counties had finished or nearly finished the recount Sunday. None reported significant problems.
The deadline for completing the recount is Wednesday.
Fulton County elections director Rick Barron told reporters he didn’t expect any major changes in vote total, the Journal-Constitution reported.
“Whenever you have humans looking at something, there’s going to be an overall difference in the count,” Barron said. “I don’t expect the margin or the overall results to change.”
After results are submitted, the secretary of state is expected to certify the election results by Friday, The Washington Post reported.
But that might not be the end of it.
Because the margin of victory is below 0.5%, Trump’s campaign is still able to request a second recount within two days of Georgia’s results being certified, according to The Washington Post. A second recount would involve election officials rescanning all the presidential ballots — again.
According to the Journal-Constitution, even if the Georgia recount does happen to result in Trump winning the state, he would still be behind Biden in electoral votes.
Trump, meanwhile, remained skeptical of the recount itself.
“Doing a great job in Georgia. Their recount is a scam, means nothing. Must see fraudulent signatures which is prohibited by stupidly signed & unconstitutional consent decree,” President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
However, on Monday, Trump took to Twitter again to call the recount into question: “The Fake recount going on in Georgia means nothing because they are not allowing signatures to be looked at and verified. Break the unconstitutional Consent Decree!”
Biden campaign lawyers said Sunday the recount was proving the state’s system “accurately counted the votes,” according to the Journal-Constitution.
“We continue to agree with the Secretary of State that there is no reason to believe that any widespread irregularities have been found,” a Biden legal team representative told reporters.
Several counties were live-streaming the recount, according to The Washington Post. Members of the public and media are able to observe the recount.
Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ordered the recount as a means of reassuring the public about the state’s presidential election results; Joe Biden is projected to win the state with an approximate 14,000-vote lead over Trump, The Washington Post reported.
Recounts typically do not change the outcome of elections, according to The Washington Post. However, given the narrow margin by which Georgia voters cast ballots favoring President-elect Biden, the fact the state has historically favored Republican candidates, and Trump’s accusations that the election was somehow rigged, officials determined a recount was warranted.
However, despite the president’s accusations of improprieties in the 2020 election, a group of Georgia voters have voluntarily dropped their lawsuit alleging illegal votes had been counted.
With their lawsuit, the Georgia voters alleged that “certifying presidential electors without excluding certain counties would violate voters’ fundamental right to vote by vote-dilution disenfranchisement.”
According to the plaintiffs, enough illegal ballots were cast and included in the results in a number of Georgia counties to cast doubt on — or potentially change — the results of the presidential election.
The plaintiffs alleged that if those ballots were indeed allowed to be included in the results, it would amount to violations of Georgia voters’ First and Fourteenth amendment rights.
The voters’ dismissal notice was short, stating only that the plaintiffs “voluntarily dismiss the above-captioned action. Such dismissal is without prejudice” and “provides for voluntary dismissal by a plaintiff without a court order where “defendants have neither answered nor moved for summary judgment.”
None of the named defendants had “answered or filed for summary judgment” in the case, the notice said.
Do you think the Georgia recount will change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.
The plaintiffs in the voter fraud lawsuit were represented by Ray Smith III of Smith & Liss LLC; and James Bopp Jr. and Melena S. Siebert of True the Vote Inc., Validate the Vote Project, The Bopp Law Firm PC.
The Georgia Voters Election Fraud Lawsuit was Brooks, et al. v. Mahoney, et al., Case No. 4:20-cv-00281-RSB-CLR, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, Savannah Division.
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