What’s going on in GA? A look at the presidential election, Senate races this morning
Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden focused on Georgia during the final month of the campaign season. The Peach State featured visits from Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr., while Biden, his wife Jill, his running mate Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama all made campaign stops in the new battleground state over the last few weeks.
Wednesday morning, Trump was leading Biden in Georgia by about 100,000 votes: 2,380,946 to 2,278,123. But while the Georgia Secretary of State’s website showed most precincts had reported, hundreds of thousands of votes remain to be tallied. Many of those votes are from Democrat strongholds, including Dougherty, DeKalb and Chatham counties. That’s why some national media outlets, including the New York Times, are indicating a Biden advantage, although no media outlet has called the state either way.
Yet to be counted
While counting and adjudicating absentee ballots was one of the reasons a winner in Georgia wasn’t called on election night, a burst water pipe at State Farm Arena, where some ballots were stored, resulted in a delay in counting Fulton County ballots.
According to a county spokeswoman, the county plans to continue tallying ballots over the next two days.
As of Wednesday morning, the Georgia Secretary of State website reported votes for 444,424 of Fulton County’s roughly 800,000 registered voters, with 13 precincts left to report. Biden was leading Trump, 319,268 votes to 120,083.
About 20,000 absentee ballots still have to be counted in Houston County.
The Associated Press is reporting that Gwinnett County had a software problem that interfered with how absentee ballots are scanned. Now some of those ballots must be adjudicated by a panel to determine the voter’s intent. AP reports that DeKalb County will resume processing mail-in votes at 11 a.m.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger will provide an update on Georgia’s vote count at 11:30 a.m. The press conference will be streamed live by GPB.
Senate races
Incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler is heading to a January runofff election with Democrat challenger Raphael Warnock after both received more than 1.2 million votes. In third place is Republican Rep. Doug Collins, who conceded the runoff to Loeffler in a phone call Tuesday evening.
Warnock leads Loeffler 1,478,243 votes to 1,228,677 as of Wednesday morning. With 20 candidates in the jungle primary election to replace former Sen. Johnny Isakson, about 21.5% of the vote went to candidates outside of the top three, so it’s difficult to determine who will have an advantage heading into January.
In the regular Georgia Senate election, Republican incumbent Sen. David Perdue brings a 2,378,559 to 2,191,806 vote advantage over Democrat challenger Jon Ossoff into Wednesday. That race has not been called, although voting for Perdue is mirroring voting for Trump more than Ossoff is reflecting Biden’s vote total.
This story was originally published November 4, 2020 at 9:10 AM.
