Georgia's GOP Secretary of State Unloads on Trump's Election Lies DMT.NEWS
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Georgia’s Republican secretary of state has had enough of President Trump’s lies about voting integrity.
After a week of attacks from Trump and his allies claiming his apparent loss in Georgia was due to voting irregularities, Brad Raffensperger fired back Sunday night, writing a series of Facebook posts knocking back the claims and taking a swipe at Rep. Doug Collins, a top Trump deputy.
In one particularly pointed post, Raffensperger defended the state’s process of matching absentee vote signatures before swinging at Collins, who was tasked with leading Trump’s post-election efforts in the state after he lost a Senate bid two weeks ago.
“Failed candidate Doug Collins is a liar— but what’s new?” Raffensperger wrote.
That was just one of many broadsides Raffensperger leveled at Trump and his erstwhile Republican colleagues, who have tried to scapegoat him for Trump’s upset in the state while lobbing lies about Georgia’s voting system and accusing him of trying to cover up fraud. Raffensperger has been the target of increasingly heated, and increasingly baseless, attacks from Trump and his allies over whether Georgia’s election was properly run, after Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate in nearly three decades to lose the state.
One of Trump’s favorite new conspiracy theories is that Dominion Voting Systems, the U.S.-based company that built the new voting machines used in Georgia this election, somehow deleted millions of votes from Trump. That claim, which originated on QAnon message boards, tries to link Dominion with the Clinton Global Initiative.
“American owned. America. ‘Merica. Not Venezuela. #America,” Raffensperger wrote along with a post linking to a BuzzFeed story headlined “The President Tweeted Something Bad Again” that debunked Trump’s lies.
Raffensperger linked to other news articles, including an Associated Press fact-check headlined “Trump Wrong on Georgia voter signature checks.”
And he shut down the false claim that Georgia allows ballot harvesting, in which activists can collect ballots rather than have people turn them in themselves. The process is illegal in Georgia.
“Truth matters. Integrity matters,” he declared.
Raffensperger has been the target of Trump and his allies ever since Georgia’s slow vote count eventually found Joe Biden with a lead of nearly 14,000 votes in the state. GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler publicly called for Raffensperger to resign last week, after reportedly being pressured by the Trump campaign to do so. And Trump himself accused Raffensperger of entering a consent decree with Democrats that allowed them to cheat.
“EXPOSE THE CRIME!” the president tweeted on Saturday.
Raffensperger partially caved to GOP pressure last week and ordered a full hand recount of all of the state’s ballots, a move that Collins and other Trump allies had been demanding. That recount is nearly complete already in most of the state, and while Friday is the official deadline for counties to finalize their results, there have so far shown almost no shifts in vote totals.
Trump went even further on Sunday, when it became clear the recount wouldn’t save him:
Raffensperger has been clear from the start that the recount was unlikely to move many votes, or give Trump much of a chance to win the state. With his Sunday-night broadsides, it seems like he’s done pandering to Trump’s increasingly unhinged claims.
via https://www.DMT.NEWS/
by Cameron Joseph, Khareem Sudlow
