By CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY and ALI SWENSON, Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — Local officials are beginning to certify the results of this year’s edition. presidential election in a process that has so far unfolded quietly, in stark contrast to the tumultuous certification period four years ago that followed the defeat of then-President Donald Trump.

Georgia is the first of the presidential battleground states to begin certifying, and local election boards are scheduled to vote all day Tuesday. As several suburban Atlanta counties certified their results without controversy, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger praised Georgia’s elections as “free, fair and fast.”

Trump won Georgia and the other six states in presidential dispute, after defeated six of them to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. County certification meetings are scheduled for later this week in several other swing states: Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

The lack of certification drama so far this week is a return to how the typically routine process worked before Trump lost his re-election bid four years ago. As he sought to overturn the will of the voters, he and his allies Republican members pressured of certification boards in Michigan delay or stop the process. They also searched delay certifications in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

The boards ultimately voted in favor of certification, but Trump is focused on certification. caught between the republicans. Some local Republican officials have refused to certify results in the elections since then, raising concerns of a broader movement reject certification this year if Trump had lost to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Part of that feeling was present Tuesday. Michael Heekin, a Republican member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, said he disagreed that certifying election results “is purely a ministerial duty.”

“We should be the first line of defense, at least one of the lines of defense in examining the goodness and accuracy of the elections,” he said.

An attorney for the county, which includes Democratic-majority Atlanta, explained during the meeting that certification was a necessary step before any election challenges could proceed. The Fulton County Board of Elections was scheduled to hold its certification vote later Tuesday.

Unlike Trump four years ago, Harris acknowledged his loss and conceded. Trump also won the popular vote for the first time during his three White House bids and praised the election results. Instead of angrily attacking county vote-counting centers, his supporters have been jubilant.

“This time four years ago, I was constantly getting nasty phone calls in my office,” said Lisa Tollefson, an elections clerk in Rock County, Wisconsin. This year, he said, “it’s been very quiet.”

That doesn’t mean everyone is happy. Conspiracy theories surrounding this year’s elections are circulating within both parties.

After Election Day, left-wing conspiracy theories proliferated on TikTok, X and other social platforms as users questioned why Harris’ total vote count was around 60 million, about 20 million fewer than that Biden received four years ago.

Some right-wing accounts twisted the narrative, falsely claiming that the vote gap was instead proof that Biden’s 2020 count must have included fake votes.

The claims did not consider the fact that tabulation would take several dayseven in Arizona and California, the most populous state in the country. As votes continue to be counted this week, Harris has regained ground and now has almost 72 million votesa number that will continue to grow.

Counties and other local jurisdictions across the country will conduct post-election voting audits in the coming weeks. They typically involve manually counting a certain number of ballots and comparing the results to automatic counts to ensure accuracy.

Before local results are certified, the chief elections official typically provides vote totals for each candidate in each race along with how many voters cast their ballots and how many total votes were cast. Any discrepancies are reported and explained.

“The goal of this period is to find those kinds of errors,” said Kim Wyman, a former top elections official in Washington state. “They’re making sure that the results are accurate, that the elections are accurate.”

All states will go through the process, including presidential battlegrounds.

In North Carolina, where election officials quickly recovered after Hurricane Helene devastated the western part of the state, election boards in all 100 counties were scheduled to meet Friday to certify results.

Pennsylvania counties have until November 25 to certify. Some larger counties were still reviewing and counting provisional ballots on Tuesday, the deadline to report unofficial results to the state. Litigation was possible with a U.S. Senate race hovering over the threshold for an automatic statewide recount.

Canvassing boards in Michigan’s 83 counties have until Nov. 19 to review local results before sending them to the State Canvassing Board. The four-member board, made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, is scheduled to certify the results by Nov. 25.