ATLANTA — Voters across the nation believed up until July there would be a potential rematch in the presidential race with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. The two were clear frontrunners in the race.
That was until Biden shocked the world, announcing he would step aside and throw his support behind his Vice President, Kamala Harris. She's been on the campaign trail across the nation ever since. The same is true for Trump and his team, who have also worked to persuade voters to send him back to the White House following his 2020 election loss.
It's been nearly four years since the fallout behind that race when Georgia became a focal point in the political landscape. In the weeks following the November 2020 election, the Peach State made national headlines as votes were recounted and lawsuits were filed to contest the outcome.
As voters look ahead to the 2024 November presidential race, here's a brief recap of the election saga that followed in the immediate weeks behind Election Day in 2020.
Georgia counted votes three times
Three times: that's how many times Georgia counted the votes in the 2020 presidential election. On Dec. 7, 2020, more than a month after the Nov. 3 election -- and after the third counting of more than 5 million ballots cast by voters across the state -- Georgia's Secretary of State re-certified the state's election results.
Biden was confirmed the winner in Georgia with a final margin of 11,779 votes. There was a razor thin difference between the candidates: Biden's 49.5% to Trump's 49.26%.
Below is a break down by county and the overall tally provided by the Secretary of State's Office.
(This story continues below the election results.)
Here's why the votes were counted three times: The initial count happened, of course, after ballots were cast in the election.
The second tally occurred when officials conducted a hand-count audit of the state's votes. Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger selected the presidential election for the statewide "risk limiting audit." The audit, state officials said, accurately portrayed the election winner, and the difference in results was within the expected margin of error.
While the audit confirmed Biden as the winner in Georgia, it was not considered an official "recount." Once the results were certified, that paved the way for the Trump campaign to request an official recount. In Georgia, candidates losing by 0.5% or less are entitled to request one after results are certified. This led to the third and final count of the presidential race in the state. It again cemented Joe Biden as the winner of the Peach State.
The false narrative of "suitcases" of ballots
Election officials continuously had to address misinformation during the 2020 election cycle. The baseless claims impacted the lives of everyday people, like Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The mother and daughter from Fulton County where thrown into a dizzying harassment campaign by Trump and his allies in the wake of the election.
The two were among the small handful of people who stayed late at State Farm Arena counting ballots into the early morning after most workers, observers and media members had left due to a misunderstanding about whether counting was done for the night. State and local officials pressed for counting to resume after it had stopped, and surveillance video of the events at State Farm Arena was seized on by Trump and conspiracists pushing the fraud narrative.
A report that outlines the investigation indicates one of the false claims alleged the mom-and-daughter election workers pulled "illegal ballots from 'suitcases' hidden underneath tables and scanned the same batch of ballots multiple times while at State Farm Arena," which was the location where Fulton County set up their ballot tabulation center.
However, those were not suitcases. They were actually the standard ballot containers used by Fulton County.
The Fulton elections director at the time explained that the video showed workers pulling out "plastic bins from underneath the desks. Those are bins that they keep under their desks near the scanners."
Fulton County was legally county ballots.
But the two women became the subject of an intense harassment campaign by Trump and his supporters. Since then, they've won a defamation lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani. They also settled a suit against a conservative website that falsely accused them of fraud.
'Fake electors' meet at the State Capitol
A group of Georgia Republicans met inside the state capitol on Dec. 14, 2020. The group, led by then-GOP chair David Shafer, signed Electoral College documents that falsely claimed Trump won the 2020 election with instructions from his campaign.
The action came even though Biden had won the state and a slate of Democratic electors was certified.
There were 16 Georgians who acted as false electors for Trump. They allegedly did that because there was a lawsuit challenging the election results pending at the time, and if a judge found that Trump had actually won their electoral slate would become valid, previous court filings indicated, according to the Associated Press.
Their actions under the Gold Dome that day led to a few of them facing charges in the Georgia election interference case in Fulton County.
The infamous phone call to 'find the votes'
It's no secret that Trump was dissatisfied with the outcome of the election. That was on full display in a phone call he had with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that surfaced in the weeks after the election.
The call happed Jan. 2, 2021.
11Alive News obtained a recording from a government source of the then-president pressuring Raffensperger to "recalculate" the Georgia vote count because "I just want to find 11,780 votes," Trump said. The recording was first released by The Washington Post.
“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump said on the phone recording, even though three separate counts of the vote total certified Biden won. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
In the one-hour phone call with election officials, Trump insisted he won the state and threatened legal consequences against Raffensperger and his staff.
Election officials have repeatedly said there was no widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election.
Listen to the call below.
Why Biden's 2020 win in Georgia was historic
Two weeks and two days after Election Day, the dramatic Georgia presidential race was called. That's when the Associated Press projected Biden as the winner for the Peach State.
The win for Biden was a significant one.
Historically, Georgia had been a solid Republican state, and had not voted for a Democrat since it elected Bill Clinton in 1992. The only other exception in which a Democrat got its vote was Georgia-born Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980.
The trend of a blue shift seemed to hold during the same 2020 election cycle in close U.S. Senate races that went to January 2021 runoffs where two Dems -- Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff -- beat two Republicans.
It's also part of the reason why the state is being considered a battleground in 2024.
This time around, both parties understand the significance of Georgia, as Harris and Trump have made several trips to the state as the Nov. 5 election nears. Whether the 2024 presidential race turns into another nail-biter remains to be seen, however, at this point polls show the race between the two well within the margin of error.