ATLANTA — Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, on Friday echoed President Trump’s claims that there are too many irregularities in counting ballots in Georgia and threatened legal action.
McDaniel said a team of lawyers had been dispatched to the state and that voters would hear about the irregularities in vote counting and tabulation “later on.”
She also said the RNC would “work with state and local authorities to ensure that a legal count is conducted in accordance to the state’s laws and that every vote is counted.”
“Democrats and their friends in the media spent the past four years and millions of taxpayer dollars talking about a Russia hoax on the grounds of election integrity,” she told a group of about 100 Trump supporters gathered outside the Georgia GOP headquarters in Atlanta. “Now, with just 48 hours after polls closed in an actual election for president, they want to ignore clear irregularities, rush to call states as won, and end the election. We will not stand for that.”
McDaniel also took a jab at Fox News, calling the conservative-leaning outlet a “mainstream” one and chided the news organization for calling a Biden win in Arizona before all of the ballots had been counted.
“The media is so quick to claim those races are over and that Biden has won. If the shoe was on the other foot and President Trump were in the lead in all of these states, the media would be screaming that the race is not over and that ‘we need more time to count and make sure it is right,”’ she said. “Because Biden is in a slight lead, the media demands the race is over.”
“The American people need to have confidence in their elections, and that is what we are going to do,” she added.
As of 6 p.m. EST, Joe Biden opened up his lead against Trump to just over 4,000 votes, according to the secretary of state’s office. Even with the wider lead, Biden’s numbers are still a fraction of 1%.
Former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue joined McDaniel, telling the pro-Trump crowd he didn’t know if the reports about voting irregularities were “true or accurate — but frankly, the widespread reporting of them is just too much to ignore.”
Ahead of McDaniel and Perdue’s parking lot rally, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, and state House Speaker David Ralston issued a joint statement saying all allegations of fraud would be taken seriously.
“Free and fair elections are the foundation of our American government. Any allegations of intentional fraud or violations of election law must be taken seriously and investigated. We trust that our Secretary of State will ensure that the law is followed as written and that Georgia’s election result includes all legally-cast ballots – and only legally-cast ballots,” they said.
Trump claimed Thursday that the “election apparatus in Georgia is run by Democrats,” even though the top election official is a Republican whom Trump personally endorsed.
Also on Thursday, a Georgia judge threw out a lawsuit filed by the state Republican Party and Trump’s campaign that accused officials in Chatham County of mishandling absentee ballots.
The lawsuit was the first in what the Georgia GOP claimed would be a dozen targeting counties in the battleground state.
