President Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to cancel his state-run election loss, according to the audio of a Saturday call between the two posted per The Washington Post Sunday. “There’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, you’ve recalculated,” the president told the state’s top election official.
Raffensperger, who along with his Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, has stood firm in refusing to annul election results, told the president in the call that there was no evidence of election fraud or electoral interference. At one point, when the president falsely claimed that the votes were scanned three times, Raffensperger replied, “Mr. President, they didn’t. We did an audit of that and we showed conclusively that they weren’t scanned three times. “
At one point in the call, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tried to spread the word by proposing to Raffensperger that they find a solution “with a spirit of cooperation and commitment.”
“We don’t agree with you,” Raffensperger replied, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Trump lost Georgia and its 16 electoral votes against President-elect Joe Biden by 11,779 votes. While Republican members of Congress have said they will oppose the Electoral College’s certification on Jan. 6 – although allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election have been repeatedly rejected in court. they are not expected to succeed in nullifying the results, as both houses must vote to reject the results and Democrats control the House.
Georgia’s Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff on Sunday criticized Trump’s phone call, saying, “This is a direct attack on our democracy and if David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler had a piece of steel in their thorns. .. would be here defending Georgia voters “.
After He Washington Post posted the audio of the phone call, Republicans were quiet about it. At a rally in Georgia ahead of the election on Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) declined to answer questions about the president’s call with Raffensperger. “I’m going to answer what I think matters to Georgia voters,” he told reporters.
Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock also shied away from commenting directly on the phone call; instead, his campaign issued a statement killing his opponent. “Kelly Loeffler has already made it clear that she does not respect Georgia voters. It is a fact that Georgians chose Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to be our next president and vice president, a fact that Kelly Loeffler still refuses to admit,” he said. “Senator Loeffler has a responsibility to speak out against unsubstantiated allegations of fraud, to defend Georgia’s election, and to put Georgia ahead of itself. He has not done so and will never do so.”