Joe Biden and Donald Trump are now neck and neck in Georgia, with the Democratic nominee ahead by 917 votes early Friday morning.
Biden is ahead by an ultra-thin margin after ballots trickled in from Clayton County, which is largely Democratic, according to CNN.
The latest figures puts both candidates in equal standing in terms of percentage points with each currently holding 49.4 per cent of the state vote.
There are now 11,000 votes that remain uncounted in the state across seven counties, in addition to the 8,900 overseas and military ballots that are due at 5pm.
At the moment there’s still no telling which way Georgia will swing as 4,800 votes are still up for grabs in Gwinnett County, the state’s second-most populous county, where Hillary Clinton in 2016 became the first Democrat to win since 1976.
There are also about 1,145 ballots left count in Forsyth County, which is primarily Republican, 1,797 in Laurens County, 700 in Cobb, 444, in Floyd, and 456 in Taylor.
Trump’s standing in Georgia has swiftly weakened in the last 24 hours, having been up 9,000 votes on Thursday morning and 18,000 on Wednesday night.
Biden could win the election with Georgia, which amounts to 16 electoral college points if he holds on to his lead in Arizona, where he’s up by 46,257, or 50.1 per cent as of late Thursday.
Trump currently holds 48.5 per cent of the tally after securing the majority vote in the state’s most populous county of Maricopa, which makes up 60 per cent of the Arizona’s total vote.
The result in Arizona is not expected until Friday because there are still 285,000 votes left to count. About 200,000 of those will come from Maricopa, where officials are expected to update the count by 11am.
Officials in both Arizona and Nevada – where only 51,000 need to be counted – say they need at least another day to get through them and get through them accurately, despite the fact that they’ve rattled through many, many more votes in the last few days alone.
In one Georgia county, there was a corrupt memory card on one scanner which meant 400 had to be recounted.
Officials in some counties are also using paper ballots for the first time in 20 years because they voted earlier this year that machine voting was not secretive enough. They are then scanning all of the paper votes which is an ‘arduous’ process, it was said on Thursday.
Speaking earlier on Thursday, Georgia’s Voting System Implementation Manager, Gabriel Sterling, said there was nothing suspicious or strange about the process, but that elections were never normally so close so it doesn’t always have to come down to an official count.
‘We can’t know how long the process will take. We hope to have clarity but “done” is a very relative term at this point.
‘As we’ve been stating for weeks and months, it’s going to take time. The effort here is to make sure everybody’s legal vote is counted properly.
‘The issue we have in Georgia is it’s a close vote. There’s other states that have more votes to count than we do but it’s a wide margin so nobody cares,’ Sterling said.
Why it is taking so long to reach a conclusion is a question that millions of frustrated Americans are asking and it’s being heard around the world. There is no simple answer for it.
In some states, it’s because the race is simply tighter than it was in the last election so is difficult for news and TV networks – who ordinarily call elections – to make a decisive projection.
Another reason is that there are more mail-in ballots this year than in elections gone by because of COVID-19.
They are taking longer to pour in and different states had different rules on when those could start being counted.
In any event, Trump is already contesting the results in several states. He says there has been voter fraud in Nevada, with people sending in ballots under dead residents’ names, and from non-residents.
In Georgia, he says they weren’t able to verify that the count was being done properly.
In Wisconsin, he is also demanding a recount, and in Michigan and Pennsylvania, he wants the counting to be halted.
Trump continued to challenge the entire election process on Thursday when he claimed it was rigged against him from start to finish by a vast conspiracy, during an extraordinary White House briefing that was cut off by at least seven television networks.
The president claimed he was the victim of a conspiracy to commit ‘historic election interference’ to give Joe Biden the presidency.
Up until then, Trump had not been seen for more than 36 hours after appearing in the White House East Room at 2.30am on Wednesday morning in front of cheering fans in MAGA hats to claim then that he had ‘won.’
In almost every state that Biden has won, Trump’s lead has been strong at first then shrank as more ballots- specifically mail-in ballots – have been tallied up.
He thinks it is suspicious.
He said he did anticipate giving a result by the end of the day.
In Georgia, Superior Court Judge James Bass said there was ‘no evidence’ to the Trump suit’s claims that 53 ballots arrived late and got mixed with other ballots. In Michigan, Judge Cynthia Stephens ruled against the Trump campaign’s push to stop the count in order to gain additional access for its observers.
