Donald Trump on Thursday lashed out at Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, calling him an “enemy of the people” after the state’s top election official certified the election results, sealing Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
Georgia voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in nearly 30 years. But the outgoing president continues to push baseless claims to explain his loss in the battleground state to Biden.
Speaking with reporters, the outgoing president accused Raffensperger, without evidence, of making some kind of “deal” with the Democrat Stacey Abrams to allow vote harvesting in Georgia and said the state had a “fraudulent system.”
“You’re not allowed to harvest, but I understand the secretary of state, who is really an enemy of the people, the secretary of state, and whether he’s Republican or not, this man, what he’s done, supposedly he made a deal and you’ll have to check this, where she is allowed to harvest but in other areas they’re not allowed,” Trump said.
Abrams has been credited with helping register 800,000 people to vote in Georgia for the 2020 election, but that is not the same as ballot harvesting, in which a voter completes an absentee ballot and gives it to another person to hand in to a polling station.
Raffensperger, a Republican who is Georgia’s top election official, has been the subject of intense criticism by the Trump campaign since the state voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in nearly 30 years. Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — two Republicans who are seeking to defend their seats in January runoff elections — have called for him to resign.
Raffensperger recently accused Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina of asking him whether he could disqualify thousands of mail-in ballots over mismatched signatures. Ethics experts have asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate whether Graham “threatened anyone with a Senate investigation of the Georgia vote tally.”
JUST IN: President Trump calls GOP Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger the "enemy of the people" as he makes repeated false claims about the 2020 election. pic.twitter.com/1gjvZ4lMq3
— The Hill (@thehill) November 26, 2020
