Georgia’s two U.S. senators have a bone to pick with the state’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. See, last week, they ran for re-election in a rare double election (usually only one senate seat is up at a time, but Georgia had a vacancy in 2019 and needed to hold a special election) and, well, they didn’t win.
They didn’t lose, either. Georgia requires its senators to win a majority of votes, and in hotly contested races both Sen. David Purdue and Sen. Kelly Loeffler came up short.
Georgia, of course, is also leaning towards President-elect Joe Biden, although the state will conduct a recount before confirming Biden’s victory. But confirming Biden’s victory is the likely result of that recount, and Secretary Raffensperger has been pretty candid about it.
It’s a super tight margin in Georgia. Biden leads by 0.2%. That’s less than eight thousand votes in a state where more than 4.9 million were cast. It took days for Georgia to count its ballots, in part because mail-in ballots were heavy in metropolitan Atlanta.
If you want to lob criticism at Raffensperger, you might point out that it should not have been a surprise that there would be so many mail-in ballots and the state could have put more resources in the hands of heavily-populated counties to make the vote count go faster. Or maybe you could point out that Georgia struggled to handle the primaries earlier this year to such an extent that news outlets warned it showed that the state would probably delay reporting results in November.
That’s not what Purdue and Loeffler are upset about though.
Instead, they’re echoing President Trump’s allegations of voter fraud – allegations that Trump appears to be fabricating in an attempt to remain in power – and saying that “mismanagement” by Raffensperger allowed for widespread fraud that gave Georgia to Biden.
Raffensperger, though, says what they’re really upset about is that they didn’t win, either.
“If I was Senator Perdue, I’d be irritated I was in a runoff.”
