Senator Senator Lindsey Graham has urged his GOP colleague and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp get firmly behind the President in his election fraud battle to prevent an intraparty “civil war” breaking out in his state. His comments come shortly after Kemp certified the election in Democrat Joe Biden's favour for a second time.
“If you’re not fighting for Trump now when he needs you the most as a Republican leader in Georgia, people are not going to fight for you when you ask them to get reelected,” Graham said, speaking to Fox News on Monday night.
“There's a civil war brewing in Georgia for no good reason. It’s not unreasonable to ask the legislature to come back in and order an audit of the signatures in the presidential race to see if the system worked. What is unreasonable is to sit on your a** and do nothing when you’ve got a chance to save the country,” the long-time South Carolina lawmaker added.
By recognising his state’s presidential election results again on Monday, Kemp handed Georgia’s 16 electoral votes to Biden after two recounts and an audit of its nearly five million ballots, with the latest count showing Biden trumping Trump by 11,769 votes.
The state’s election authorities have indicated that they would require a court order to carry out a new audit focused on verifying and matching signatures of mail-in ballots, with the latter cited by the Trump campaign as rife with fraud.
“The governor of Georgia could call a legislative session into being tomorrow and go ahead and audit the signatures so we’d have confidence in the presidential outcome,” Graham insisted, echoing the president’s claims and suggesting that Trump “got screwed over with the mail-in voting system in Georgia.” Kemp has publicly rejected calls for a special session of the legislature over the matter.
Signature Verification Battle and ‘Blockbuster Testimony’
Trump tweeted on Saturday that he would “easily and quickly win Georgia” if Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger were to approve a “simple signature verification.”
I will easily & quickly win Georgia if Governor @BrianKempGA or the Secretary of State permit a simple signature verification. Has not been done and will show large scale discrepancies. Why are these two “Republicans” saying no? If we win Georgia, everything else falls in place!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 5, 2020
Earlier, the Trump team announced that it had found a “blockbuster testimony” in the form of CCTV footage allegedly showing election supervisors, Republican observers, and members of the press being asked to go home in the early morning hours after the election, before staffers proceeded to pull ballots from underneath a table and continue counting. However, Republican Raffensperger dismissed the alleged video evidence as “unfounded” after an internal investigation. Trump’s supporters don't tend to agree.
Trump had complained about mail-in ballots for months ahead of the 3 November election, calling them “a disaster” and suggesting they could easily be altered, forged, or stolen by people working for his opponents. He continues to maintain that the election was stolen from him. On Monday, Trump's economic advisor Larry Kudlow assured Americans that one way or another, there would be a peaceful transition of power to Joe Biden in January.
