Certified: Georgia election chief finalizes Trump's win and statewide results

ATLANTA — All votes have been counted and President-elect Donald Trump’s clear victory in Georgia is confirmed.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger certified the election results Friday after two audits and unanimous approval by county election boards across the state.

The final count showed Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris by 115,100 votes, a 2.2 percentage point margin.

Republicans also retained their majorities in Congress, the state Senate and the state House after the election.

“The votes were counted accurately, securely and quickly,” said Raffensperger, a Republican. “I’m proud to certify these results and we congratulate President-elect Donald J. Trump on his victory.”

After the last election four years ago, Trump criticized Raffensperger for certifying Joe Biden’s narrow win by 11,779 votes, a 0.2 percentage point margin.

Trump falsely claimed the election was stolen and pressured Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to reverse the result. A criminal case alleging Trump tried to subvert the 2020 election has stalled in Fulton County, and Trump’s attorneys plan to ask a judge to dismiss the charges because he’s the newly elected president.

This time, without any dispute over the outcome, Raffensperger isn’t facing controversy since Harris conceded without complaint.

Certification makes the results official, a step required by state law 17 days after the election. Since then, election officials have checked vote counts, verified voting data and signed off on the winners.

Besides the presidential race, Republicans secured the same majorities over Democrats in Congress and the state Senate, holding a 9-5 lead in Washington and a 33-23 advantage in the state Senate. Republicans lost two seats in the state House but still maintain a 100-80 majority.

A hand-count audit this week showed similar results as the machine count, with tiny differences that Raffensperger attributed to human error.

The manual review of nearly 750,000 ballots — about 14% of total turnout — reported 11 more votes for Trump and six fewer for Harris.

In all, turnout reached a record of nearly 5.3 million voters in Georgia.

The secretary of state’s office said election officials also completed a second audit that used text-recognition technology to read candidate names printed on every ballot cast in Georgia, and then counted the totals. The numbers were compared to vote counts from ballot scans on election night, which tabulated results from QR codes printed on ballots.

Raffensperger didn’t immediately release details of the text-recognition audit Friday.

State law also requires Gov. Brian Kemp to certify Georgia’s election results by Saturday.

Next, electors for Trump will meet in the Georgia Capitol to record their votes on Dec. 17, and then Congress will count Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.

Trump will be inaugurated Jan. 20.

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