ATLANTA — Georgia began counting its votes for the third time on Tuesday. The official recount came nearly three weeks after Election Day.
Joe Biden officially won Georgia by more than 12,000 votes on Friday, when its results were finally certified, following a roughly weeklong hand-count audit of all of the state's 5 million votes.
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 recount is being done by machine instead of hand, absent a court order or through certain provisions in Georgia law to account for malfunctioning machines.
There's also the likelihood of further legal action being taken in Georgia, despite the unsuccessful attempt last week by one prominent suit to stop the state from certifying its results.
Between the recount and a Dec. 8 deadline under federal law for legal challenges to be resolved, the long, winding 2020 election process in Georgia still has a ways to go until it reaches a concrete finale.
TUESDAY'S BLOG: Georgia begins recount Tuesday
Throughout the day, we’ll update this blog with new information from the counties as they continue the tally along with other election updates.
4:20 p.m. | Here's a look at how things are going in Cobb County.
2:45 p.m. | Remember how Andrew Yang said he was going to move to Georgia to lend his help to the Democratic cause in the Senate races? It caused a bit of consternation in the Secretary of State's Office, as they wanted to make clear you can't move to Georgia just to vote in January.
Well, Yang clarified he was just coming to help campaign, and it appears he's here now:
11:50 a.m. | 11Alive's Brendan Keefe points out Lin Wood's appeal - following a dismissal by a District Court judge of his suit to stop Georgia from certifying its election results - appears to be facing stiff headwinds.
11:00 a.m. | In that last press briefing, Fulton County Elections Director Rick Barron pegged the cost for the hand-count audit and official recount together at about $400,000. In Georgia, counties (and by extension taxpayers) bear the costs of these recounts.
10:10 a.m. | Fulton County started its recount this morning, and you can watch it at the Fulton Government TV YouTube page. The county says it will be holding a press briefing in about 20 minutes at 10:30 a.m.
9:20 a.m. | President Trump retweeted a very bizarre claim that here in Georgia, "they threw away the envelopes with the signatures that the ballots came in, then commingled the mail-in ballots with the day-of ballots so there was no way to tell them apart."
The counties are supposed to keep the envelopes for records purposes, and outside of an incident in Spalding County there's been no suggestion they've been thrown out anywhere.
The second part of the claim - that elections workers in Georgia mixed the mail-in ballots with the Election Day ballots so that there wouldn't be a way to tell them apart - is simply foundationally wrong.
It wouldn't matter if elections workers had done that, because the ballots that were printed out for in-person voters look nothing like the ballots that were mailed in or dropped at drop-boxes by absentee voters. It would be impossible to mistake one for the other.
8:30 a.m. | In case you missed it, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has written an editorial in USA Today this morning in which he says President Trump - the man he voted for - is throwing him under the bus.