It’s official: President Donald Trump lost Georgia three times in one election after he pressured the state’s Republican leaders to ignore an earlier recount and launch yet another. State election officials completed that count and are re-certifying President-elect Joe Biden as the winner, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced Monday during a press conference. “It's been a long 34 days since the election on November 3,” he said. “We have now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remained unchanged.”
Raffensperger bragged about strengthening signature matching, moving toward an audible paper ballot system, and requiring each vote-by-mail applicant to provide a photo of a driver’s license. He also said he’s outlawed ballot harvesting, which would’ve allowed third parties to collect and deliver completed ballots. He and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp have been criticized repeatedly for notoriously suppressing the vote of Black and brown Georgians to serve the Republican Party, but Trump still wants them to further disenfranchise Georgians. “The Republican Governor of Georgia refuses to do signature verification, which would give us an easy win. What’s wrong with this guy? What is he hiding?” the president tweeted Monday.
He found support in none other than Newt Gingrich, who The Atlantic calls "the man who broke politics." “The objective fact is I believe Trump probably did actually carry Georgia,” he said. “I believe that the election process is a mess. I really wish the governor (would) call a special session to clean it up.” Gingrich went on to encourage Republicans to vote in the upcoming Senate runoff. “Republicans simply have to turn out more votes than Stacey Abrams can steal,” he said. Translation: How dare the former congresswoman and Georgia gubernatorial candidate fight the GOP's voter suppression tactics by working to register people of color?
Abrams has worked for more than a decade to register voters in Georgia. She founded the New Georgia Project nonprofit to register an estimated 800,000 new voters, mostly people of color and young people often overlooked in the state.
In a low blow, Raffensperger equated Abrams, who refused to concede the gubernatorial race to Kemp two years ago, with Trump, whose tweets are flagged on a daily basis as disputed. “So let’s discuss where we are and where we are heading in Georgia,” Raffensperger said. “All this talk of a stolen election whether it’s Stacey Abrams or the president of the United States is hurting our state.”
The difference is Abrams’ claims of voter suppression were supported by actual facts. As secretary of state, Kemp allowed an estimated 107,000 Georgia residents to be purged from voter rolls simply for failing to vote in past elections, according to a report by the nonprofit American Public Media. And that's only 15% of the nearly 700,000 total voters purged from rolls before the gubernatorial election. Kemp, who by the way was overseeing the very election he was competing in, also allowed more than 200 polling places across the state to be shut down, mostly in poor communities of color. It led to an estimated 54,000 to 85,000 voters prevented from casting ballots, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. And Kemp put 53,000 voter registrations of mostly Black voters “in electoral limbo” last October, The Washington Post reported. “The move was the result of an ‘exact match’ policy in which even a single digit or a misplaced hyphen could derail the registration,” the Post added. Kemp only beat Abrams by 54,723 votes, and Raffensperger only beat Democrat John Barrow by 55,806 votes in a runoff election in 2018.
Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes. The president-elect acquired 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232. The election was closer than it should have been, considering the president led us into a deadly pandemic, but it was by no stretch of the imagination a close race. Now, the presidential race was close in Georgia, but Biden still won by more than 11,000 votes.
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The Georgia runoff is Jan. 5. Click here to request an absentee ballot. Vote in person as early as Dec. 14. And REGISTER TO VOTE here by Dec. 7
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