Graham rejects claim on pressuring Georgia to toss out ballots
Sen. Lindsey Graham has rejected the recent remarks by Georgia secretary of state in which he claimed that Graham had hinted that he should discard the legal mail-in ballots as the state is on track to finish its recount.
"I reject that," Graham told CNN correspondent on Tuesday.
"What I am very concerned about is if you are going to continue to vote by mail, then we need to know what systems work and what don't. It is up to the people of Georgia ... I thought it was a very pretty good conversation," he added.
In an interview with CBS on Tuesday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced that Graham, a Republican senator and one of the closest allies of US President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill, had called him on Friday to ask several questions about signature matching.
"When Senator Graham called, I just assumed that he was calling about the two runoffs for the senators, so I called him back," Raffensperger said.
"During our discussion, he asked if ballots could be matched back to the envelope — the absentee ballots could be matched back to the envelope. I explained our process, after it went through two sets of signature match, at that point they were separated. But then Senator Graham implied for us to audit the envelopes and then throw out the ballots for counties who have the highest frequency error of signatures. I tried to help explain that because we did signature match, you couldn't tie the signatures back anymore to those ballots," he added.
Raffensperger further noted that he had spoken with his advisers on Graham's comments and "decided the best action was not to get back and re-engage."
"When I went down this other path, I think the best thing was just to disengage and move forward," he said. "We want to make sure that every legal vote counts and every illegal vote doesn't count."
On Friday, the mainstream US media projected that Biden will win Georgia and its 16 electoral votes.
Unofficial results put Biden ahead of Trump by about 14,000 votes, or about 0.3 percentage point. But due to the tight margin, state officials decided to use the pre-planned audit process to recount every ballot in the presidential race.
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