Lindsey Graham’s claim that he wasn’t interfering in
the Georgia vote doesn’t add up
Opinion by
Columnist
November 17, 2020 at 1:21 p.m. CST
So who
are you going to believe?
Georgia
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, when he says that one of
President Trump’s most reliable allies pressured him to throw out legitimate
votes during a laborious hand recount of ballots in a state
that Joe Biden won by a nose?
Or Sen.
Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) who says that he was doing nothing of the sort when
the two of them talked last Friday?
“If he
feels threatened by that conversation, he’s got a problem,” Graham said. “I
actually thought it was a good conversation.”
A good
conversation. It is hard to miss the uncomfortable echo of Trump’s claim that
he was impeached for a “perfect phone call,” in which he pressured Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 to dig up dirt on Biden’s son.
But at
least in Trump’s case, it was not hard to see why he and Zelensky would have
been on the phone. Heads of government speak to each other all the time.
Why in
the world was Graham, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, nosing
around in the ballot-counting process of a state he doesn’t even represent?
Raffensperger,
it should be noted, is a conservative who says he has never voted for a
Democrat. In his 2018 runoff election, Trump endorsed him in a tweet as
someone who would be “a fantastic Secretary of State for Georgia.” The
president praised Raffensperger, an engineer and state legislator, as “tough on
Crime and Borders, Loves our Military and Vets. He will be great for jobs!”
When
Raffensperger received a message on Friday that Graham had called him, he told “CBS This
Morning” on Tuesday, he assumed that the South Carolina senator wanted to
discuss the Jan. 5 runoff races for both of Georgia’s Senate seats. So he
returned the call.
Raffensperger
said he was surprised to discover that Graham wanted instead to talk about the
ongoing audit of the presidential race and the state law that matches
signatures to mail ballots to assure their legitimacy. According to what
Raffensperger told my Post colleague Amy Gardner in an interview, Graham raised
a conspiracy theory that suggested biased poll workers might have accepted
ballots with nonmatching signatures.
The
implication was stunning and impossible to miss. Raffensperger told Gardner
that Graham was urging him to find a way to toss legally cast ballots,
something the secretary of state does not have the power to do, absent court
intervention, even if he were so inclined. “It sure looked like he was wanting
to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.
He said
he didn’t argue with Graham. “I really just got off the call, and I said I
would circle back,” Raffensperger told CBS News. After
speaking with his counsel, he decided “not to get back and re-engage.”
On
Tuesday, the senator told reporters on
Capitol Hill that he has also spoken about vote-counting procedures with
officials in Arizona and Nevada out of concern about election integrity.
For
doing his job according to the law in the 2020 election, Raffensperger has been
subjected to abuse and even, he says, death threats. Georgia’s two Republican
senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, have called on him to resign.
All of this is, no doubt, spurred by claims from the president himself that the
election is being stolen from him.
It
isn’t. Biden won. He did it by
not only flipping Georgia from red to blue but also amassing 306 electoral
votes and a popular-vote margin that stands at upward of 5.6 million votes and
is growing. This is not a landslide — though Trump declared that reaching the
exact same total of electoral votes in 2016 was one — but it is also not a
particularly close result.
Raffensperger
has expressed confidence that the ultimate tally certified in Georgia will
confirm that the election in his state was conducted with integrity.
“As a
Republican, I wish the results would go another way, but I think that at the
end of the day, what you’re going to see is this audit is going to verify what
the machines counted and then we’ll certify,” he said Tuesday.
No
matter what your political leanings, this should be a cause for celebration
that our democracy is sound and fair. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said
for some of those who are elected under that system.
