NY Times report that Georgia’s secretary of state certified President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state on Friday, dealing a blow to President Trump’s bid to overturn the vote in a half-dozen battleground states and with it the national election that Mr. Biden won decisively.
The Georgia certification, which ensures that Mr. Biden will receive the state’s 16 electoral votes, was an early milestone in the state-by-state process of finalizing Mr. Biden’s victory, a process that is set to unfold in the coming days as Mr. Trump continues to deny his defeat and cry fraud and his campaign and its surrogates inundate the courts with largely baseless lawsuits that have so far been unsuccessful.
“I live by the motto that numbers don’t lie,” the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top election official and a Republican, said at a Friday morning news conference at the state capitol. “I believe that the numbers that we have presented today are correct.”
The certification followed a hand recount of the state’s five million votes that Mr. Raffensperger ordered after it was requested by the Trump campaign. The recount found that Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump by more than 12,000 votes.
