ATLANTA — County elections workers have a little more than a week to recount some 5 million votes cast in the presidential election for a third time.

The Trump campaign requested another recount of the presidential contest in Georgia after President-elect Joe Biden came out on top both in the initial machine count and the statewide hand audit.

Starting Tuesday, all 159 counties have until Dec. 2 to finish another machine recount — the timeline taking into consideration the Thanksgiving holiday, according to election officials.

Under Georgia law, candidates who lost their race with a margin under .5% of the total votes cast are allowed to request a recount. The margin certified by the state had Biden win Georgia by 12,670 votes, well within the range for President Donald Trump to request a recount — which taxpayers will pay for.

The unprecedented statewide hand audit of the presidential race upheld Biden as victor, with only a slight difference after initially untallied votes were discovered and added to the original machine count.

Varying margins between the initial machine tally, the audit and the ongoing recount were always expected, according to election officials.

Statewide voting implementation managers told reporters Monday the Georgia Secretary of State’s office expects the margin to vary again after the recount and likely be even closer to the original machine count because the process will be the same.

“Historically, you very rarely see much movement in the vote totals you see coming out of (recounts),” said Gabriel Sterling, statewide voting implementation manager. “And you’re more likely to see changes in a hand audit, because there’s a lot more human error introduced in the process than you do using the scanner.”

Absentee ballots will again be run through the scanner and flagged if the machine cannot read them. A bipartisan panel will adjudicate those ballots — the same process as the initial count after election night — and determine the intent of the voter.

Trump and his supporters have repeatedly requested re-verification of signatures on voters’ absentee ballots with the state’s voter registration file — a process that election officials said is unfounded at this stage.

Sterling said the office has found no widespread evidence that signatures were not matched properly and have “no reason to believe” there have been issues since signature-match rejection rates were as expected and voters were also allowed to “cure” their ballots if they were notified of an issue.

“Both parties knew the rules on this on the front end,” he said. “So now coming up with a generalized grievance afterwards that there may have been an issue because the person that I wanted to win didn’t is not a reason to have an investigation.”