'It's close': Georgia election boss says counting is taking longer because race is so tight

If Joe Biden were to win the state it would bag him the White House

A senior Georgia election official has defended the time needed to count all of the votes, saying that the race in the state “is close”. 

Donald Trump currently leads Joe Biden in the southern state by fewer than 13,000 votes, and there are up to 50,000 ballots still to be counted.

Were Mr Trump to bag the once solidly-red state and its 16 electoral votes, it would go some way to calming nerves in the president’s campaign.

Yet, if Mr Biden were to bag them, they would carry him over the 270 electoral vote threshold required to win the presidency, though given how close the race is there, an automatic recount might be ordered. The Trump campaign would certainly request one.

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On Thursday afternoon, Gabriel Sterling, State Voting System Implementation Manager, said being “done” with the count was a relative term.

“We can’t know how long the process will take,” he added. “We hope to have clarity on the outcomes of these elections as soon as possible.”

He added: "However, when you have so many important elections in the state being so close ‘done’ is a a very relative term at this point.

“We're trying to get all the legal votes counted accurately, so we can get the right results and make sure that everybody's vote is reflected properly.”

On Wednesday, Mr Trump's reelection campaign said it had filed a lawsuit in Georgia to require that Chatham County separate and secure late-arriving ballots to ensure they are not counted.

The lawsuit, brought against the Chatham County Board of Elections, asked a judge to order the county to secure and account for ballots received after 7 pm on election day, according to a court document released by the campaign.

As of 4pmET on Thursday, the totals in Georgia stood at 2,732,120 votes for Mr Trump, and 2,655,383 for Mr Biden, giving the president a lead of 0.4 per cent.

“The issue we have in Georgia is... it's a close vote," added Mr  Sterling. 

“There's other states that have more votes to count than we do, but it's a wide margin, so nobody cares.”

Additional reporting by Reuters