Joe Biden made a belated dramatic progress in counting the ballot for Georgia, having succeeded President Donald Trump in the crucial swing state since the polls closed on Election Day.
Biden advanced by 917 votes at 4.30 am local time, according to the Associated Press, with more than 99 percent of the vote counted.
Of the last batch of 1,843 votes recorded, just over 1,600 or about 87 percent went to Biden. NBC News estimated that there were about 65,000 ballots to be counted in the state as a whole.
The new batch of votes came from Clayton County, an Atlanta suburb that tends to vote for Democrats and which falls under the Congressional District controlled by the late civil rights leader John Lewis.
While several counties paused overnight late Thursday, Clayton pledged to continue counting absentee votes until every last one is reported. The county was seeing nearly 85 percent of its vote going to Biden, and it had 3,500 ballot papers remaining as of 1.30 a.m. local time.
“We will stay here until every absentee ballot is counted,” Shauna Dozer, the superintendent of elections for Clayton County, told CNN a few hours ago. “We are doing our best to sort out every vote,” she said, while urging those waiting for a result to be patient.
Georgia will provide enough Electoral College votes to raise the Democrat above the critical threshold of 270, if he can keep the lead in Arizona. Arizona was declared Biden early by several networks, but it is now being watched closely.
Election officials say more than 99 percent of the vote is now counted in Georgia, with both candidates receiving about 49.4 percent of the roughly 5 million votes cast in the state.
Trump won Georgia 5 big points in 2016, taking 51 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 46 percent.
Georgia has been reliably a republic since 1972, except when there was a Southern Democrat on the card – Georgians sided with their original son Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980 and Bill Clinton in 1992.
