ATLANTA — Georgia’s massive hand audit of the presidential contest statewide upheld the results that President-elect Joe Biden won the Peach State, election officials announced Thursday.

Sixteen days after polls closed on Nov. 3 the Secretary of State’s office confirmed Biden beat out President Donald Trump in the race for Georgia’s electoral votes by a margin of more than 12,000.

The differential in the margins was as expected, elections officials said, due to human-error that inevitably occurs when people are doing the work.

“Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Secretary of State Raffensperger said in a statement. “This is a credit to the hard work of our county and local elections officials who moved quickly to undertake and complete such a momentous task in a short period of time.”

The full manual tally of all the votes cast in the presidential race was intended to confirm the winner and not necessarily the exact votes cast, but it still leaves room for the Trump campaign to request another recount of the more than 5 million ballots.

Biden’s original margin of nearly 14,000 votes decreased after four counties discovered batches of uncounted ballots during the audit that were not scanned or uploaded.

The Secretary of State’s office has been battling disinformation circulating — fueled by Trump’s baseless allegations of voter fraud — and noted multiple times that the audit should give Georgians reassurance that the outcome is accurate.