November 17, 2020, 10:18 am*
Lindsey Graham has been under scrutiny (again) after Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger claimed that the Republican Senator was pressuring him to throw out absentee ballots that could help turn the state back towards President Trump. Now, Graham is refuting the accusations.
Advertisement
Hide
Despite voter suppression efforts throughout the state, Democratic voters in Georgia turned out for Joe Biden on November 3, putting him ahead of Trump by just about 14,000 votes. It’s certainly close enough to be in contention, and Raffensperger ordered a recount of all 5 million ballots to ensure the results are accurate.
Advertisement
Hide
Georgia alone isn’t enough to change the results of the presidential election — Trump would have to invalidate the results of several states in order to win the 270 electoral votes needed to remain president. Biden is currently expected to win 306, whereas Trump has a mere 232.
But the Trump campaign is continuing to file lawsuits and make utterly baseless accusations of voter fraud in every state that at some point looked like it could have gone red. And his loyalists are supporting this move, repeating his accusations and, according to Raffensperger, even looking for ways to exclude legally cast votes.
“[Graham] asked if the ballots could be matched back to the voters, and then…I got the sense it implied that then you could throw those out,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Advertisement
Hide
Raffensperger’s comments echo an interview in which he claimed “Graham questioned [him] about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures,” as reported by The Washington Post’s Amy Gardner.
Advertisement
Hide
Specifically, he said that Graham wanted to know if it would then be possible to exclude ALL mail-in ballots from whichever counties had the highest rates of non-matching signatures.
“It was just an implication of ‘Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out,’” Raffensperger said.
Advertisement
Hide
Graham denied the accusations, seemingly insisting that he was just casually trying to learn more about Georgia’s voting process and thought that perhaps they needed stricter signature verification — despite
Advertisement
Hide
“I said, ‘Do you have power as secretary of state to require bipartisan verification of the signature,’ because right now they don’t,” Graham said. “What I want to see happen all over the country, if we’re going to use mail-in voting, is that when it comes to verifying signatures, that you have a process that’s bipartisan, where both sides can look at the signature. If there’s a dispute about whether or not you think it’s valid, you put it in some kind of appeal system.”
As it stands, signature verification happens in Georgia both when a voter requests an absentee ballot and when that voter returns a completed ballot. The signature is verified on the outside of the envelope, meaning there is no way to know, at that time, who the person voted for, and thus it would stand to reason that there is no benefit to having members of both parties analyze the signature unless the goal was to get as many ballots from a county that leaned towards a specific party tossed as possible.
Advertisement
Hide
Raffensperger has continued to insist on the integrity of Georgia’s election, despite his fellow Republicans skewering him for it over their belief that he should be supporting Trump’s fruitless crusade rather than putting country and democracy over party.
Still, Graham insists the conversation between them was completely normal and not at all sketchy.
Advertisement
Hide
“If he feels threatened by that conversation, he’s got a problem,” the Senator said.
*First Published: November 17, 2020, 8:45 am
0 Comments