ATLANTA — Former Vice President Joe Biden’s lead over President Trump in Georgia grew Saturday morning by 7,200 votes, according to the secretary of state’s office.
The new bump follows the overnight count of provisional ballots in left-leaning Fulton County.
There are still about 12,770 provisional ballots left to be counted statewide, in addition to about 8,400 military votes.
In Gwinnett County, 535 absentee ballots will be counted Saturday, along with three military or overseas ballots. Biden’s lead in the Peach State is still a fraction of 1% and means that a recall looks likely.
On Friday, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue held a parking-lot rally for about 100 pro-Trump supporters at the state’s GOP headquarters in Atlanta.
McDaniel threatened legal action over irregularities in counting ballots. She said a team of lawyers had been dispatched to the state and that voters would hear about the issues in vote-counting and tabulation soon.
She also blamed the “mainstream media” for rushing to hand Biden a win.
“Democrats and their friends in the media spent the past four years and millions of taxpayer dollars talking about a Russia hoax on the grounds of election integrity,” she said. “Now, with just 48 hours after polls closed in an actual election for president, they want to ignore clear irregularities, rush to call states as won and end the election. We will not stand for that.”
McDaniel also took a jab at Fox News, calling the traditionally conservative outlet a “mainstream” one and chided the news organization for calling a Biden win in Arizona before all of the ballots had been counted.
Perdue said he didn’t know if the reports about voting irregularities are “true or accurate — but frankly, the widespread reporting of them is just too much to ignore.”
Trump on Thursday claimed that the “election apparatus in Georgia is run by Democrats,” even though the top election official is a Republican whom Trump personally endorsed.
On Friday, the president tweeted vague questions about military ballots in Georgia in an effort to continue to raise doubts about the integrity of the election process.
The last time a Democratic presidential nominee won in the state was Bill Clinton in 1992.
In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Georgia by 5 percentage points.
