Counting and re-counting votes in the U.S. presidential election

The top election official in the U.S. state of Georgia announced on Wednesday all the presidential ballots cast in the state will be recounted by hand.

"This will help build confidence. It will be an audit, a recount and a recanvas all at once," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said at a press conference. "It will be a heavy lift."

The recount will happen in all 159 counties in the state. The audit must be completed by Nov. 20, the deadline for vote count certification.

On Wednesday morning, with 99% of the vote counted in the state, Democrat Joe Biden, the projected winner of the presidential race, currently has .26 percent lead over President Donald Trump, or 14,108 votes, according to the Associated Press. Nearly five million votes were cast. The state has no automatic recount policy, but candidates can request if the margin of votes between the top two candidates is under .5 percent.

In face of the narrow margin, Republicans in the state pressed for recounts and investigations on voting irregularities. Raffensperger, a Republican, vowed to count every legal vote.

There's been no evidence of widespread fraud, according to election officials nationwide.

Over the past 20 years, there have been just 31 statewide general election recounts out of nearly 6,000 contests, according to FairVote.

"Statewide recounts almost never overturn more than a few hundred votes," said Ken Kollman, professor of political science at the University of Michigan. Even if there is a recount, Kollman added, "I'm very skeptical" that the vote differences will be significant enough to change any results.

In the states of Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, Biden's lead was too wide to qualify for a recount. As of Wednesday afternoon, Biden was ahead of Trump by 12,614 in Arizona, 36,870 in Nevada and 50,483 in Pennsylvania.

Officials in all states are conducting their own voting audit, which is a standard practice of the voting result certification process. 49 states have so far found no evidence of illegal voting.

The Trump campaign has refused to accept election results and has challenged the integrity of the election, according to the New York Times.

"There's a great human capacity for inventing things that aren't true about elections," said Frank LaRose, a Republican who serves as Ohio's secretary of state. "The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology."

"Many of the claims against the commonwealth have already been dismissed, and repeating these false attacks is reckless…No active lawsuit even alleges, and no evidence presented so far has shown, widespread problems," Jacklin Rhoads, a spokeswoman for Pennsylvania's attorney general responded to the Trump campaign's voting fraud claims against the state. Pennsylvania's secretary of state also plans to "promptly" ask a federal judge to dismiss a new lawsuit by the Trump campaign, which aims to block the state from certifying the election results.

Since President Trump tweeted Nevada is "turning out to be a cesspool of Fake Votes", the state has received many reports of fraud. But the Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, said many voter fraud complaints lacked evidence after investigations.

In face of Trump's complaint about transparency of vote counts in the state of Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger dismissed the allegations and ignored calls to resign.

"We were literally putting releases of results up at a minimum hourly," Raffensperger said in a statement. "I and my office have been holding daily or twice-daily briefings for the press to walk them through all the numbers. So that particular charge is laughable."

The absence of any significant findings of voting fraud or irregularities is making it difficult for President Trump to change the projected outcome.

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