ATLANTA, Nov 22: President Donald Trump's re-election campaign on Saturday night (Sunday morning in India) put forth the Republican request for another recount of votes in Georgia. It had just finished a detailed, full hand recount only Thursday, starting Friday the previous week. Now he is seeking a comprehensive recount which is not allowed by the State law.

A request letter for recount was hand-delivered to the secretary of state’s office by Trump's campaign.

In the latest tally, Biden is beating Trump by 12,670 (as per website) votes out of about 5 million cast. The State's law allows the losing candidate to seek a recount by machine after certification if the margin is less than 0.5%. Here Trump is trailing by 0.3%.

As per the State laws, the losing party is entitled to stake a claim to a free recount after the certification of the results by the Secretary of State, which was over Friday. The documents were countersigned by the Governor on Saturday for sending them forward to Washington. As per law, Trump has time till coming Tuesday to ask for the recount.

The recount allowed after the result certification by the State is by law limited to machine counting. However, Trump is asking for a rescanning of the ballots by the machines as also verification of the envelopes and signatures of the mail-in and absentee ballots, which is the main bone of contention.

Because of coronavirus, Democratic candidate and former Vice-President Joe Biden's campaign had exhorted the voters countrywide to opt for mail-in ballots and early in-person voting, and the turnout was very heavy, much more than half the electorate.

If one follows the sequence, Trump, anticipating a conspiracy, months earlier tried to limit the postal voting by cutting off Federal funds to the postal department. Naturally, lots of ballots landed at counting centres much later than November 3 and Trump wanted them to be thrown out when the counting was under way. The seeds of suspicion were sown long before the election on November 3.

Besides, Intelligence inputs could have cautioned him about a Dominion Voting System vote flipping of which after the voting nothing could be done for lack of evidence. He is now drawing a parallel with the Venezuelan Smartmatic fraud! But he is forgetting the investigation into the allegation against himself over the vote 'fixing' gifted by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the 2016 election that he won. Trump claims this time a China-Latin American clique worked for the Democrats, but why couldn't he act on time!