Former Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler asked the state's attorney general to investigate Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The call for an investigation, made in a letter from Loeffler to Attorney General Chris Carr on Wednesday and obtained by the Washington Examiner, is the latest development in a fight between Raffensperger, who’s also a Republican, and others within his party who have found fault with how he handled the 2020 elections.
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The former senator, who lost her seat to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in a Jan. 5 runoff, accused Raffensperger of having “put his political self-interest ahead of the people of Georgia in conducting elections.” She wants Carr to investigate “whether these actions constitute a conflict of interest in violation of the Georgia Constitution and/or statues.”
Raffensperger downplayed “voters’ legitimate concerns about changes to Georgia’s elections which were related to the pandemic,” Loeffler claimed, saying her request for an investigation is “not about the outcome of an election.”
In the letter, Loeffler listed seven “examples of potential conflicts of interest,” including not taking “sufficient corrective” actions prior to the general election or runoff election after the primary had problems as well as the leaked phone call between Raffensperger and former President Donald Trump, in which the president urged him to “find” the votes necessary for him to carry the state.
"The status of hundreds of primary and general elections investigations … remains unknown,” she said, criticizing changes Raffensperger made ahead of the election, including the use of drop boxes and the distribution of mass mail-in ballot applications to people who had not asked for them.
Loeffler’s "failure to convince anyone she actually was a Trump supporter is the reason Georgia doesn’t have a Republican Senator or the United States a Republican Senate. The letter and the allegations in it are laughable," Raffensperger said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
Katie Byrd, a communications director for the attorney general's office, told the Washington Examiner it cannot investigate the secretary of state.
"Under the Georgia Constitution, the Department of Law is the lawyer Executive Branch of government — which includes the Secretary of State’s Office," she said. "As such, we cannot investigate our own client on these particular matters. We’ve forwarded the letter to our client for their review and appropriate response."
Many Republicans joined Trump in questioning the integrity of the election, including Georgian Republicans who pushed back on Raffensperger and his office.
Raffensperger maintained throughout Trump’s pressure campaign that the elections were conducted securely. In several counties, Georgia officials performed hand recounts, machine recounts, and an audit of signature matching, none of which changed the outcome.
Loeffler and former Republican incumbent David Perdue lost their seats in the Georgia runoffs, giving the Democrats control of the Senate.
Republicans have argued in favor of strengthening voter identification laws and limiting absentee voting, among other measures, as a way to restore confidence in election outcomes, though Democrats say the GOP wants to disenfranchise voters, specifically minorities, after the state went blue for the first time since 1992. Democrats, in turn, promote limiting voter identification laws and call for additional early voting.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed an election bill into law March 25 that will change the way elections are conducted in the Peach State.
The law, which has led to boycotts, added an identification requirement for absentee ballots instead of using signature verification, and the law will alter the timing of runoff elections, among other changes.
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It will also present state officials with the authority to take over local election boards in certain circumstances, and it codified the use of drop boxes, which had only been approved for 2020 given the coronavirus pandemic, though they will be placed in early voting locations that can only be accessed during the business hours of the voting precinct.
Dozens of states have passed or are working on passing election laws in both Democratic- and Republican-controlled states, although conflicting ones could be overridden if the Senate passes S.1, the federal election overhaul bill that passed in the House of Representatives on March 3.
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