The Associated Press has called elections since the mid-1800s. The respected group named Joe Biden the President-elect on Saturday, November 7, after he secured more than the required 270 votes from the Electoral College, despite counts persisting in parts of the country.

However, the AP typically avoids calling states when a recount is likely or already in the works. Hence, their official call for Georgia was in limbo—until Thursday, November 19, when the state announced the results of its hand tally recount of the presidential race.

The AP called Georgia for Biden shortly after the state’s announcement, bringing his total votes from the Electoral College up to 306. However, Donald Trump’s legal agenda to discredit the 2020 General Election trudges on.

The Trump administration has released a deluge of lawsuits and recount requests in response to the prospect of Biden soon moving into the White House. Georgia, a swing state, opted to initiate a risk-limiting audit by hand to confirm that the five million Georgian voters did, in fact, elect a Democrat for President for the first time in decades.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a self-described “conservative Christian Republican,” ordered the audit of the presidential election in his state, initiating a full recount by hand. The audit began after all the state’s counties had certified their ballots, which concluded midnight Wednesday, November 18.

The recount was meant as “an audit, a recount and a recanvas all at once,” according to Raffensperger. He believed the state’s risk-limiting audit procedure would help instill faith into the equipment technology as well as the vote.

Biden maintained a lead of over 12,000 votes in Georgia at the conclusion of the recount, decreasing his lead over Trump in the state by about 1,200 votes. Georgia state law allows a candidate to request a recount after the state certifies their votes if the candidate is within a 0.5% margin. In such a case, the ensuing recount is carried out by machine; Raffensperger designated the manual audit, or “hand recount,” to circumnavigate concerns about the software used for voting in the state, Dominion Voting Systems.

Raffensperger announced his intention to audit the votes after fellow Republican officials (including the Trump campaign) demanded the action, and the pressure stayed high throughout the audit.

Some even called for his resignation in light of the election’s handling: Georgia’s current U.S. Senators, both of whom are Republicans facing Democratic unseating in January runoff elections, issued a joint statement on November 9, demanding the Georgia secretary of state step down immediately. Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue demanded “transparency and uniformity in the counting process” and called for Raffensperger to resign from office. They did not offer evidence for the voter fraud claims they share with Mr. Trump but asserted that Raffensperger “has failed the people of Georgia.”

“Georgians are outraged, and rightly so,” the Senators said. “We have been clear from the beginning: every legal vote cast should be counted. Any illegal vote must not."

Raffensperger responded to their statement with assurances to keep the election and recount fair and legal; he declined any notions of resignation. The recount, he said, would deliver confidence in the election results.

“I know emotions are running high. Politics are involved in everything right now,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “If I was Senator Perdue, I’d be irritated I was in a runoff. And both Senators and I are all unhappy with the potential outcome for our President.”

“As a Republican, I am concerned about Republicans keeping the U.S. Senate,” he added. “I recommend that Senators Loeffler and Perdue start focusing on that.”

U.S. Representative Doug Collins, the leader of Trump’s recount team in Georgia, issued a letter with the Georgia GOP following the Senators’ statement. The letter to Raffensperger claimed millions of Georgians doubted the count. It outlined multiple sources of voters’ distrust. The first several of these claims centered on straightforward voter fraud, such as duplicate ballots and votes cast by deceased residents. The final complaints pointed to “denial of statutory access to observe” ballots being opened and counted, and the exclusion of Republicans from voting panel meetings.

The letter asserted that each of the claims has “substantiated documentary, testimonial and expert evidence,” but the evidence did not surface.

During the hand tally, Republican U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham also spoke with Raffensperger regarding the ballots. Raffensperger claims the Senator indicated a desire for the Georgia Secretary of State to throw out Democratic ballots in the process; Graham denies any wrongdoing.

Twitter has repeatedly flagged Trump’s posts about the Georgia vote and recount for misinformation. He continues to claim widespread “improprieties and fraud” in the election, despite his own appointed official, Christopher Krebs, the Director of the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, declaring the 2020 General Election the “most secure” in American history.

Trump fired Krebs for making what the president termed a “highly inaccurate” statement regarding the elections.

In a statement, the Trump campaign said that the “so-called recount went exactly as we expected because Georgia simply recounted all of the illegal ballots that had been included in the total.”

Out of Georgia’s 159 counties, the audit revealed discrepancies of more than single digits in only four counties. Each was able to trace the errors that led to the ballots going uncounted and found the issues rooted in accidents and human error. Officials across the state firmly agree that no widespread issues affected the vote’s legitimacy.

"Georgia's historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state's new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results," Raffensperger said. "This is a credit to the hard work of our county and local elections officials who moved quickly to undertake and complete such a momentous task in a short period of time."

In all, the audit unearthed about 5,800 ballots to add to the presidential race results; Trump gained less than 1,400 votes from the recount.