Why, pray tell, is Georgia doing a hand recount rather than re-running the machine count? That’s a good question from ABC News’ Brad Mielke in this short clip of his interview with Brad Raffensperger, who never quite answers the why question. Instead, the Georgia secretary of state explains why people can have confidence in the results of a hand recount, as the paper ballots are simplified and they only need to recount one election:

.@StartHereABC speaks with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on the state’s hand recount of the presidential election results.

LISTEN: https://t.co/hXlz8lDEK4 pic.twitter.com/fQyvepDUck

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) November 12, 2020

Raffensperger offers a very good, if brief, explanation of the how. What about the why? For that we can refer back to Allahpundit’s lengthy post this afternoon, in which he reviews all the ways in which Donald Trump and his allies have spent the last week undermining machine systems. That sets an environment where the only way to deal with recounts is by hand, even though they may have a marginally more significant issue with accuracy, as Mielke says. However, we are still talking about extremely small deviations, and in this case the counters will have observers to double-check and challenge as the need arises.

In the end, however, the process choice doesn’t really matter much. American voting infrastructure is highly reliable and resilient to manipulation, even if the voting process can sometimes be less immune to it. That is why, as Karl Rove argued last night, there is almost zero chance that any of the states in which Trump trails will flip in a recount, let alone three or more necessary to move the Electoral College count to 270 in Trump’s favor.

Raffensperger told CBS News that today, too:

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger dismissed accusations of widespread voter fraud in his state, after Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, along with the state GOP chair, criticized his handling of the election.

“At the end of the day, we don’t see widespread voter fraud, but we will investigate every case we hear,” Raffensperger said on “CBS This Morning” Thursday.

While he acknowledged that election officials already had “multiple investigations” ongoing, Raffensperger said they do not “rise to the level of 14,000” — the number of approximate ballots by which President Trump is trailing President-elect Biden. …

“We had record registrations, and people were just participating on both sides of the aisle,” he said. “At the end of the day, I think you’ll find that when we do the hand recount of all the votes, it will substantiate what we have gotten with electronic ballot counting.”

Raffensperger called a hand recount of all ballots cast in the presidential race on Wednesday, in order to “build confidence” in Georgia’s electoral system.

Perhaps this will not just restore confidence in Georgia’s voting system, but also in the US system in general. There will probably be other recounts — Team Trump has already demanded one in Wisconsin — but the gap there is over 20,000, larger than Georgia with a smaller number of votes cast. Once those are finished, and without any evidence of actual fraud being presented in court where it has to be submitted in good faith, we can put this election behind us and move onto dealing with the runoffs in Georgia — where we can still have an impact on 2020.