Trump files lawsuit in Georgia to stop vote count amid race to declare result in key state
It’s one of many suits the Trump campaign is lodging to challenge the election results before votes have finished being counted
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Your support makes all the difference.The Trump campaign has filed a lawsuit in Georgia to stop the counting of ballots it alleges might have been received too late, the AP reports.
Georgia remains undecided for president and could help tip the race, and the president’s lawsuit is just one of potentially a dozen that are planned in the state around the election, according to state Republicans.
The Trump campaign and the Georgia Republican Party lodged the complaint against the Chatham County Board of Election on Wednesday, alleging a Republican election observer saw a poll worker take unprocessed absentee ballots from a back room and mix them with processed absentee ballots waiting to be tabulated. Under state law, ballots must be received by 7pm on election day to count.
Chatham County includes the city of Savannah and leans Democratic.
It’s the campaign’s third suit challenging state election processes, alongside legal actions in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The president prematurely declared victory in the election, and has since threatened legal action across the country on the unsubstantiated claim that Democrats are trying to cheat on election results.
According to live election results, with 95 percent of votes reported, the president leads Joe Biden in the state by 1 percent, with 2,423,518 votes to the former Vice President’s 2,377,527. But much of the remaining vote to be counted appears to be in the greater Atlanta area, where the Democrat has done best so far.
State officials urged election authorities to try and finish counting by the end of the day on Wednesday, but with thousands of ballots to go, that deadline isn’t certain.
The state is usually reliably Republican and hasn’t gone for a Democratic president since 1992.
Georgia’s not alone in a dramatic count, as officials in Nevada said their hotly anticipated election returns might not be fully available until Thursday.
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