Georgia Recertifies Its Results After 2nd Recount Affirmed Biden’s Victory

Georgia’s top election official said the state had “counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged.”

ATLANTA — Georgia’s secretary of state Monday recertified the results of the state’s presidential race after another recount reaffirmed Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory over President Trump, the third time that results showed that Mr. Trump had lost the state.

The announcement delivered an important punctuation mark to a tumultuous postelection campaign in the state by Mr. Trump and his allies to subvert the outcome of the election there, which caused infighting and name-calling among some Republicans.

“We have now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged,” Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said Monday morning. The results of the machine recount on the secretary of state’s website show Mr. Biden with a lead of about 12,000 votes.

Mr. Raffensperger’s announcement came less than 48 hours after Mr. Trump appeared in the state at a rally intended to support Georgia’s two Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who are locked in high-stakes runoff races. The president, however, spent much of his appearance airing grievances over his losses to Mr. Biden in Georgia and elsewhere, claiming falsely, as he has for more than a month, that fraudulent voting had stolen the election from him.

Mr. Biden has prevailed in three counts of the vote in Georgia: the initial election tally; a manual hand recount of over five million ballots ordered by the state; and the latest recount, which was requested by Mr. Trump’s campaign and completed by machines.

Mr. Raffensperger on Monday chastised both Mr. Trump and Stacey Abrams, the 2018 candidate for governor who acknowledged her loss but who claimed that her race was rendered fundamentally unfair because of Republican-designed policies that Democrats have described as voter suppression efforts. Some of Ms. Abrams’s supporters have claimed that the race was stolen from her.

“All this talk of a stolen election, whether it’s Stacey Abrams or the president of the United States, is hurting our state,” Mr. Raffensperger said.

He also said that he would support legislation offering “a major reform of our election processes” in the coming state legislative session.

It was one of numerous signs that the future of elections in Georgia — a once reliably red state that has seen a Democratic resurgence in recent years — is likely to remain an emotional and litigious battleground over voting rights and access to the polls.

On Sunday, Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and Mr. Raffensperger both said in television interviews that it was clear that Mr. Biden had won. But in an evening debate between Ms. Loeffler and her Democratic rival, Raphael Warnock, Ms. Loeffler declined to say, when questioned, that Mr. Trump had lost the election.

Mr. Trump has been pushing Gov. Brian Kemp to order an audit of voter signatures. The governor has said that he would also like to see an audit, but he has argued that his office does not have the authority to order one. The president has also urged the governor to order a special legislative session in which lawmakers might assign a new slate of delegates that would favor him. But the governor has repeatedly declined to call for a special session.