South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham sure does want Donald Trump to win the presidential race he lost to President-elect Joe Biden. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Graham had hinted that he should try to discard some ballots in Georgia, where a recount is taking place after the state went for Biden. Raffensperger, a Republican, said that Graham had pushed him to throw out legally cast ballots, and that’s caused a firestorm of attention.
“He asked if the ballots could be matched back to the voters,” Raffensperger said in an interview on CNN. “And then he, I got the sense it implied that then you could throw those out for any, if you look at the counties with the highest frequent error of signatures. So that’s the impression that I got.” He continued later to say, “It was just an implication of, ‘Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.’
For his part, Graham denied Raffensperger’s claim on Monday, insisting to CNN that he had said he wanted to understand the process for verifying the signatures on mail-in ballots.
We’ll see about that because Raffensperger told The Wall Street Journal that there were witnesses on the call who could confirm his account of the story.
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“Mr. Raffensperger said that when he was contacted by Mr. Graham Friday, he thought the senator was calling about the state’s two Senate races,” the Journal reports. After an initial conversation, Mr. Graham called back again and brought up the idea of invalidating absentee ballots from counties with higher rates of signature errors, Mr. Raffensperger said, adding that he had staffers with him on that call.”
“Mr. Raffensperger and his staffers agreed not to act on any of Mr. Graham’s suggestions, he said. “We have laws in place,” he said,” the news outlet reports.
And while Graham has previously denied that Donald Trump urged him to make the call, we have to wonder why he did it. After all, this is about the presidential election that Donald Trump is disputing. When asked if he was trying to pressure the secretary of state to toss legal ballots, Graham said, “That’s ridiculous.”
Well, we think Graham is ridiculous. The South Carolina Republican certainly isn’t putting his country above his party.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0
