US Election 2020: Trump says ‘big voter fraud info’ due on Georgia

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President Donald Trump continued with claims of election fraud on Saturday morning as he alleged ‘big voter fraud information’ had been discovered in Georgia. 

‘Big voter fraud information coming out concerning Georgia. Stay tuned!’ Trump tweeted. 

Biden was declared the winner in Georgia after a hand recount this week and Trump’s previous claims of fraud have been widely dismissed as his legal team has failed to supply any proof. 

‘I believe that the numbers that we have presented today are correct. The numbers reflect the will of the people,’ Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said of the result Friday.   

The hand count showed Biden won by more than 12,000 votes out of about 5 million cast, according to data released by Raffensperger’s office Thursday.

‘Working as an engineer throughout my life, I live by the motto that numbers don’t lie,’ Raffensperger said during a news conference at the state Capitol. 

Raffensperger, a self-described ‘passionate conservative,’ has endured criticism and insults from fellow Republicans – from the president to the chair of the state Republican Party – over his handling of the election. He acknowledged their feelings on Friday.

‘Like other Republicans, I’m disappointed our candidate didn’t win Georgia’s electoral vote. Close elections sow distrust. People feel their side was cheated,’ he said.

But Raffensperger, as he had repeatedly done before, defended the integrity of the process and the results.  

Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Georgia since 1992. 

The Georgia result was announced as Trump returned to the White House briefing room on Friday to claim he had ‘won’ the election. 

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany also refused to say when Trump will concede the election to Joe Biden, citing ‘ongoing litigation’.  

As Trump continued his refusal to concede, his supporters gathered for the third day straight on Friday on the steps of the State Capitol building in Atlanta and staged a ‘stop the steal’ rally attended by InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

It came after Georgia county’s board of elections voted to fire its chief clerk on Thursday after 2,600 uncounted ballots were discovered just before the district initially certified the results. 

The Floyd County board met for about an hour on Thursday in a special session that ended with a vote to dismiss Floyd County Chief of Elections Clerk Robert Brady. 

During a statewide audit earlier this week, election officials found the 2,600 ballots that were not counted in the earlier totals.

Election officials discovered that they failed to upload a memory card containing electronic counts of those votes on Election Day, according to the Athens Banner-Herald.

As a result of the discovery, election officials had to rescan more than 8,000 ballots to make sure there were no other discrepancies.  

Of the 2,600 discovered ballots in Republican-leaning Floyd County, most of them went for Trump.

The new batch of ballots slashed Biden’s lead over Trump by some 800 votes – still not enough to overcome the Democrat’s advantage.

Democrats and Republicans agreed that Brady should have been fired and that the uncounted ballots were a result of human error rather than a deliberate attempt to sabotage a free and fair election. 

Also this week, three attorneys filed an ethics complaint against Sen. Lindsey Graham, accusing the South Carolina Republican of pressuring a Georgia elections official to toss out legally cast absentee votes in the presidential race. 

In a complaint filed Wednesday with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, Claire Finkelstein, Richard Painter and Walter Shaub ‘urge the committee to investigate whether Senator Graham suggested that Secretary Raffensperger disenfranchise Georgia voters by not counting votes lawfully cast for the office of president.’ 

They also ‘demand clarity as to whether Senator Graham has threatened anyone with a Senate investigation of the Georgia vote tally and or taken steps to initiate such an investigation’.

The complaint also requests that Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, ‘be recused from any investigation or other Senate matter relating to alleged irregularities in the 2020 election’ while any probe of his comments is ongoing.

The complaint stems from comments by Raffensperger, who said this week that Graham asked him whether he had the power to reject certain absentee ballots, a question Raffensperger interpreted as a suggestion to toss out legally cast votes. 

Raffensperger told The Washington Post he’s faced rising pressure from fellow Republicans who want to see Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow lead in the state reversed.

Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop called the attorneys ‘longtime vocal critics’ of both Graham and Trump, adding, ‘Their complaint should be viewed in that light.’

When asked about the conversation with Raffensperger, Graham said Monday that he was ‘trying to find out how the signature stuff worked’ and that Raffensperger ‘did a good job of explaining to me how they verify signatures.’

Asked about Raffensperger’s interpretation that he was suggesting legally cast ballots should be thrown out, Graham said, ‘That´s ridiculous.’

The result in Georgia gave Biden 306 electoral votes, a total that Trump called a ‘landslide’ when states delivered him that number in 2016. 

Biden also achieved victory in key states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona, topping the threshold of 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency with room to spare.  

Yet on Saturday morning, Trump continued to claim victory and that fraud would be unearthed in Michigan. 

‘Massive voter fraud will be shown!’ he wrote, alongside a statement about his meeting with the Michigan legislature. 

‘This is true, but much different than reported by the media. We will show massive and unprecedented fraud!’ 

Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield issued the joint statement Trump shared after flying to Washington to meet with the president – on a day Trump claimed he ‘won’ the election, despite trailing Biden by 6 million votes. 

They said, however, that they will ‘follow the law’.  

The lawmakers said they have not seen anything that would ‘change the outcome’ of the race – despite Trump’s lawyers repeatedly claiming a ‘massive’ fraud had occurred. 

Their statement also included language saying fraud should be ‘taken seriously’ and be prosecuted if uncovered. 

‘We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election,’ Shirkey and Chatfield said in the statement. 

It came after they got hounded by protesters upon arriving in Washington. They say they got invited to the White House Wednesday night. 

Trump’s allegations of massive voting fraud have been dismissed by a succession of judges and refuted by state election officials and an arm of his own administration’s Homeland Security Department. 

Many of his campaign’s lawsuits have been thrown out of court.

A coalition of state election officials and the Trump administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have declared that the election was the most secure in history. 

Trump responded by firing the head of his agency, Chris Krebs. 

He also continued to claim he had ‘won’ the election as he returned to the White House briefing room on Friday for the first time since the election. 

The president blasted Pfizer and ‘Big Pharma’ – although he misstated the name of the company, calling it ‘FISA,’ that announced the dramatic vaccine breakthrough after the election.

He also accused drug companies of holding out until after the election, without providing evidence of why it did so.

‘So they waited and waited and waited and they thought they’d come out of it a few days after the election. And it would have probably had an impact. Who knows probably it wouldn’t have,’ he said.

‘Sure the Democrats would have found the ballots someplace,’ he theorized – alluding to his claims of a ‘rigged’ election.

Earlier Friday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany refused to say when Trump will concede the election while claiming that the current occupant of the Oval Office was denied an orderly transition by his predecessor. 

McEnany ended her 15-minute briefing, her first in two months and in which she only took a few questions, with the false claim President Trump was not given an easy, early transition to power. 

‘I would note just as we talk about transfer of power in the election and its worth remembering, this president was never given an early transition of power. His presidency was never accepted,’ she said.

Then-President Barack Obama hosted Trump in the Oval Office on November 10 – two days after the 2016 presidential election – to congratulate him on his win and let the transition process begin.

Hillary Clinton also conceded the election to Trump. 

The White House press secretary held out hope that Trump could score legal victories in court that may give him a second term in office. 

‘There is ongoing litigation, what we know 74 million Americans have voted for this president and more votes than any president has gotten in history,’ she said at her first press briefing since October 1.

‘There are very real claims that the campaign are pursuing,’ she said of the campaign’s ongoing litigation in battleground states Biden won.

‘We are taking it day by day and we will wait for that litigation as it plays out,’ she noted. 

The president is running out of time to overturn the results of the election to his favor. 

In just a matter of days, Michigan and Pennsylvania will certify their results while his lawsuits are going no where.