The move was the latest blow to President Trump’s attempts to subvert the election results. But battles over the process of voting in Georgia are likely to continue.
ATLANTA — Georgia election officials on Monday recertified the results of the state’s presidential race after another recount reaffirmed Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory over President Trump, the third time that results showed that Mr. Trump had lost the state.
The announcement delivered the latest blow to Mr. Trump’s tumultuous attempts to subvert the outcome of the election in Georgia, an effort that has caused infighting and name-calling among some Republicans.
“We have now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged,” Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said at a news conference.
Mr. Biden has prevailed in three separate counts of the ballots: the initial election tally; a hand recount ordered by the state; and the latest recount, which was requested by Mr. Trump’s campaign and completed by machines. The results of the machine recount on the secretary of state’s website show Mr. Biden with a lead of about 12,000 votes.
Mr. Raffensperger’s announcement came less than 48 hours after Mr. Trump appeared in the state at a rally intended to support the candidacies of Georgia’s two Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who are locked in high-stakes runoff races on Jan. 5 that will determine control of the Senate. The president, however, spent much of his appearance airing a long list of personal grievances over his loss to Mr. Biden in Georgia and elsewhere, claiming falsely that fraudulent voting had stolen the election from him.
Mr. Raffensperger on Monday chastised both Mr. Trump and Stacey Abrams, who acknowledged her loss in the race for governor in the state in 2018 but who claimed that race was rendered fundamentally unfair because of Republican-designed policies that Democrats have described as voter suppression efforts. Ms. Abrams has said that the 2018 election was “stolen from the voters.”
Mr. Raffensperger said, “All this talk of a stolen election, whether it’s Stacey Abrams or the president of the United States, is hurting our state.”
He also said that he would support legislation offering “a major reform of our election processes” in the coming state legislative session.
It was one of numerous signs that the future of elections in Georgia — a once reliably red state that has seen a Democratic resurgence in recent years — is likely to remain an emotional and litigious battleground over voting rights and access to the polls.
For the Senate runoff races, election officials in Cobb County, the state’s third most populous county, are planning to open fewer than half of the early voting locations that were available in the general election. Voting rights groups said on Monday that the changes would harm Black and Latino voters.
Mr. Biden won Cobb County, part of the Atlanta suburbs, by 14 percentage points, improving on Hillary Clinton’s two-point margin in 2016. But the county is planning to open only five early voting locations for the runoffs, down from 11, one of the largest such reductions in the state. Nearly 400,000 people voted in Cobb County in the general election, many through early in-person or mail-in voting.
Janine Eveler, the director of elections in Cobb County, said that the county was forced to cut back on polling locations because of severe staffing shortages. “It was not our desire to reduce the number of early voting locations for the runoff, but, unfortunately, it became a necessity,” she said in a statement.
But Georgia Democrats see partisan politics at play in a county that is currently controlled by Republicans. They noted that the locations that were closed were in largely Democratic neighborhoods, including places with large Black and Latino populations.
Voting rights and civil rights groups pleaded in a letter to Ms. Eveler and other officials to keep all 11 sites open.
“Georgia’s Black and Latinx residents are more likely to live in poverty than other residents and will have more difficulty traveling long distances to access advance voting locations, especially because of the limited public transportation options in Cobb County,” the letter said. “As a result, the elimination of advance voting locations will discourage or prevent many of Cobb County’s Black and Latinx voters from participating in the runoff election.”
Groups including the N.A.A.C.P. and Fair Fight Action, the voting rights organization led by Ms. Abrams, had offered to help recruit more election workers, but Ms. Eveler said there would not be enough time to train them.
On Sunday, Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and Mr. Raffensperger both said in television interviews that it was clear that Mr. Biden had won the state. But in a debate that evening between Ms. Loeffler and her Democratic rival, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, Ms. Loeffler declined to say, when questioned, that Mr. Trump had lost the election.
Mr. Trump has been pushing Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, to order an audit of voters’ signatures on ballots. The governor has said that he would also like to see an audit, but he has argued that his office does not have the authority to order one.
The president had also urged the governor to order a special legislative session in which lawmakers might assign a new slate of Electoral College members who would favor him. But the governor repeatedly declined to call for a special session, and he said in a statement on Sunday that such a gambit was not allowed by state or federal law.
Yet Mr. Trump continued to pound away at Mr. Kemp on Monday. “The Republican Governor of Georgia refuses to do signature verification, which would give us an easy win,” he wrote on Twitter. “What’s wrong with this guy? What is he hiding?”
It was unclear how an audit of signatures might help Mr. Trump’s cause. When absentee ballots are processed by county elections officials, they come in envelopes with the voters’ signatures on the outside. These signatures are checked against the signatures in state databases. But the envelopes are then separated from the ballots to ensure voters’ anonymity. That means that individual ballots could not be questioned even if problems with the signature-matching process were to come to light.
A top official in Mr. Raffensperger’s office, Gabriel Sterling, also spoke at the news conference on Monday and addressed other misunderstandings and unfounded conspiracies, sarcastically referring to the presentation as “Disinformation Monday.”
Among other things, Mr. Sterling denounced as bogus a claim that suitcases of ballots were illegally brought into a Fulton County elections center, and a rumor circulating on the internet that two Democratic state senators had been involved in counting ballots.
Also on Monday, a federal judge in Atlanta tossed out a lawsuit alleging a vast conspiracy to hack into and manipulate voting machines in Georgia. The suit had been filed by Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for Mr. Trump whom his campaign has disavowed.
Richard Fausset reported from Atlanta, and Nick Corasaniti from New York. Alan Feuer contributed reporting from New York.
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