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      Stock Trades by Senator Perdue Said to Have Prompted Justice Dept. Inquiry

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      WASHINGTON — Early this year, Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, sold more than $1 million worth of stock in the financial company Cardlytics, where he once served on the board. Six weeks later, its share price tumbled when the company’s founder announced he would step down as chief executive and the firm said its future sales would be worse than expected.After the company’s stock price bottomed out in March at $29, Mr. Perdue bought back a substantial portion of the shares that he had sold. They are now trading at around $120 per share.The Cardlytics transactions drew the attention this spring of investigators at the Justice Department, who were undertaking a broad review of the senator’s prolific trading around the outset of the coronavirus pandemic for possible evidence of insider trading, according to four people with knowledge of the case who described aspects of it on the condition of anonymity. Though Mr. Perdue alluded to the federal inquiry in a campaign ad this fall, its details have not been previously reported.Investigators found that Cardlytics’ chief executive at the time, Scott Grimes, sent Mr. Perdue a personal email two days before the senator’s stock sale that made a vague mention of “upcoming changes.” The timing of the message prompted additional scrutiny from investigators in both Washington and Atlanta. But ultimately they concluded the exchange contained no meaningful nonpublic information and declined to pursue charges, closing the case this summer.The federal scrutiny, which also included attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission, is the most vivid example to date of how Mr. Perdue’s complex financial interests and frequent trading have complicated his pursuit of a second Senate term. The results of January’s two Senate runoffs in Georgia, including Mr. Perdue’s race, will determine which party controls the chamber and with it, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s ability to advance his agenda through Congress.Democrats have used details of his trades to accuse Mr. Perdue of lining his pockets when Americans were worried about their jobs and health, and in some cases, leveled corruption charges.Congress’s ethics rules do not bar lawmakers from holding or trading individual stocks, but like other Americans, they are not allowed to trade on inside information. Other lawmakers have decided it is not worth the political sweat that comes with the appearance of possible conflicts of interest and have steered their investments into diversified mutual funds. But Mr. Perdue, a former executive at Reebok and Dollar General, has been one of the most active traders on Capitol Hill.A spokesman for Mr. Perdue’s campaign confirmed the investigation in a statement, saying that investigators with the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission “quickly and independently cleared Senator Perdue of any wrongdoing — this story highlights that again.”“Senator Perdue has always followed the law,” the spokesman, John Burke, said.A Justice Department spokesman and Securities and Exchange Commission officials did not respond to requests for comment. Representatives for the U.S. attorneys’ offices in Washington and Atlanta and the F.B.I. declined to comment.A spokesman for Goldman Sachs, which handles Mr. Perdue’s portfolio, said that the bank had “fully cooperated with inquiries” about Mr. Perdue but declined to comment further, citing a policy of not commenting on its clients.Mr. Grimes and officials at Cardlytics did not respond to requests for comment.The inquiry into Mr. Perdue roughly coincided with an unusual blitz of federal scrutiny on senators and their financial transactions, but it appears to have taken a somewhat different track.In the other cases, the Justice Department’s public corruption unit focused on stock sales around the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when markets dropped precipitously, by Senators Richard Burr of North Carolina, Dianne Feinstein of California, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia. Ms. Loeffler is competing in the state’s other runoff election.Investigators scrutinized whether the senators had dumped stocks and bought others in key sectors after receiving nonpublic briefings on the virus from experts and ahead of the market drop. The cases were closed on all of them except for Mr. Burr.The investigation into Mr. Perdue appears to have started in a similar fashion, but came to focus more intensely on the Cardlytics transactions.F.B.I. agents in Washington spoke with Mr. Perdue in June, asking him questions about his financial transactions. The extent of the conversation was unclear, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation.Mr. Perdue’s lawyers turned over hundreds of pages of information, including the emails with Mr. Grimes, in response to a subpoena from a grand jury.During the campaign, Mr. Perdue disclosed in a televised ad that a “full review of his stock trades” by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission had “cleared him completely,” but made no mention of Cardlytics or the extent of the federal scrutiny.Mr. Grimes and Mr. Perdue had known each other since at least 2010, when Mr. Perdue joined the board of Cardlytics, then a small and privately held Atlanta start-up. Mr. Perdue resigned his directorship in 2014 after his election to the Senate, but struck an unusual financial arrangement on his way out that paved the way for him to benefit from holding a stake in the company when it went public four years later.As a senator, Mr. Perdue continued to hold shares of Cardlytics, where executives said he had made valuable contributions to the company, along with scores of other stocks that he traded. In 2019, Mr. Grimes made the maximum donation of $5,600 to Mr. Perdue’s re-election efforts, in what appeared to be his only political contribution of the election cycle.The email correspondence between the two men began on Jan. 21 and took place just before Mr. Perdue placed the well-timed trades.“David, I know you are about to do a call with David Evans,” Mr. Grimes wrote from his iPad, according to a copy of the exchange reviewed by The New York Times. “As an FYI, I have not told him about the upcoming changes. Thanks, Scott.”Mr. Evans, then the chief financial officer of Cardlytics, stepped down from that role six weeks after Mr. Grimes sent the email, at the same time that Mr. Grimes announced plans to assume a new role as executive chairman. Mr. Evans said in July that he was leaving the company.Mr. Perdue responded to Mr. Grimes’s email by saying he would check with his Senate scheduler but “I don’t know about a call with David or the changes you mentioned.”Mr. Grimes wrote back the next morning to apologize.“David, Sorry. That email was not meant for you. Wrong David!” he wrote.Mr. Perdue then contacted his wealth manager at Goldman Sachs, Robert Hutchinson, and instructed him to sell a little more than $1 million worth of Cardlytics shares, or about 20 percent of his position, three of the people said. One person familiar with the inquiry into Mr. Perdue’s trades said that the conversation was memorialized in an internal Goldman Sachs record later obtained by the F.B.I.Financial disclosure forms Mr. Perdue is required to file with the Senate show a Jan. 23 sale of $1 million to $5 million in Cardlytics stock.Investigators in Washington began scrutinizing Mr. Perdue in the spring; by June, the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta was handling the case along with prosecutors in the department’s criminal division in Washington.Mr. Hutchinson told the F.B.I. that Mr. Perdue and his wife weighed in only on broader investing issues, like the proportion of stocks and bonds to hold in their portfolio, according to a person with knowledge of his interview. But a person familiar with the senator’s money-management arrangements with Goldman Sachs said that Mr. Perdue retained some degree of discretion over which trades were made and when.In this case, Mr. Perdue’s legal team told investigators that Mr. Hutchinson had advised their client in October 2019 that he needed to sell Cardlytics shares to balance his holdings. The shares had increased in value and the advisers argued that Mr. Perdue should take the profits from the sales and reinvest them elsewhere to limit his exposure to the fluctuation of a single stock. Mr. Perdue elected to go forward with those changes in January, his lawyers said.Mr. Hutchinson declined to comment.After conducting interviews, including with Mr. Perdue and Mr. Grimes, investigators reached their conclusion that the senator had no nonpublic information about the company’s performance when he made the Cardlytics trade. The investigation was closed later in the summer, according to the people familiar with the case.If the email from Mr. Grimes was accidental, said Tai Park, a former federal prosecutor and white-collar crime partner at the law firm White & Case, Mr. Perdue “may be on firmer ground, because that’s objective evidence that the C.E.O. was not trying to tip him. In any event, trading on the basis of information learned from a C.E.O. of a company is exceedingly risky under any scenario and could draw attention from investigators.” More

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      Happy Thanksgiving to All Those Who Told the Truth in This Election

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      With so many families gathering, in person or virtually, for this most unusual Thanksgiving after this most unusual election, if you’re looking for a special way to say grace this year, I recommend the West Point Cadet Prayer. It calls upon each of these future military leaders to always choose “the harder right instead of the easier wrong” and to know “no fear when truth and right are in jeopardy.”Because we should be truly thankful this Thanksgiving that — after Donald Trump spent the last three weeks refusing to acknowledge that he’d lost re-election and enlisted much of his party in a naked power play to ignore the vote counts and reinstall him in office — we had a critical mass of civil servants, elected officials and judges who did their jobs, always opting for the “harder right” that justice demanded, not the “easier wrong” that Trump and his allies were pressing for.It was their collective integrity, their willingness to stand with “Team America,” not either party, that protected our democracy when it was facing one of its greatest threats — from within. History will remember them fondly.Who am I talking about? I am talking about F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee, who in September openly contradicted the president and declared that historically we have not seen “any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election” involving mail-in voting.I am talking about Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — a conservative Republican — who oversaw the Georgia count and recount and insisted that Joe Biden had won fair and square and that his state’s two G.O.P. senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, did not garner enough votes to avoid election runoffs. Perdue and Loeffler dishonorably opted for the easier wrong and brazenly demanded Raffensperger resign for not declaring them winners.I am talking about Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who not only refused to back up Trump’s claims of election fraud, but whose agency issued a statement calling the 2020 election “the most secure in American history,” adding in bold type, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”Krebs did the hard right thing, and Trump fired him by tweet for it. Mitch McConnell, doing the easy wrong thing, did not utter a peep of protest.I am talking about the Republican-led Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County, Ariz., which, according to The Washington Post, “voted unanimously Friday to certify the county’s election results, with the board chairman declaring there was no evidence of fraud or misconduct ‘and that is with a big zero.’”I am talking about Mitt Romney, the first (and still virtually only) Republican senator to truly call out Trump’s postelection actions for what they really were: “overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election.”I am talking about U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann, a registered Republican, who dismissed Trump’s allegations that Republican voters in Pennsylvania had been illegally disadvantaged because some counties permitted voters to cure administrative errors on their mail ballots.As The Washington Post reported, Brann scathingly wrote on Saturday “that Trump’s attorneys had haphazardly stitched this allegation together ‘like Frankenstein’s Monster’ in an attempt to avoid unfavorable legal precedent.”And I am talking about all the other election verification commissioners who did the hard right things in tossing out Trump’s fraudulent claims of fraud.Asking for recounts in close elections was perfectly legitimate. But when that failed to produce any significant change in the results, Trump took us to a new dark depth. He pushed utterly bogus claims of voting irregularities and then tried to get Republican state legislatures to simply ignore the popular vote totals and appoint their own pro-Trump electors before the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14.That shifted this postelection struggle from Trump versus Biden — and who had the most votes — to Trump versus the Constitution — and who had the raw power and will to defend it or ignore it.To all of these people who chose to do the hard right thing and defend the Constitution and the rule of law over their party’s interest or personal gain, may you have a blessed Thanksgiving.You stand in stark contrast to Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo (who apparently never attended chapel at West Point), Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Nikki Haley, Kayleigh McEnany and all the other G.O.P. senators and House members, who put their party and self-interest before their country and opted for the easy wrongs. History will remember them, too.Though Trump is now grudgingly letting the presidential transition proceed, we must never, ever, forget the damage he and his allies inflicted on American democracy by attacking its very core — our ability to hold free and fair elections and transfer power peacefully. Tens of millions of Americans now believe something that is untrue — that our system is rigged. Who knows what that will mean in the long run?The depths to which Trump and his legal team sank was manifested last Thursday when Giuliani and Sidney Powell held a news conference alleging, among other things, that software used to disadvantage Trump voters was created at the direction of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. It was insane.As Jonah Goldberg, a conservative critic of Trumpism, wrote in thedispatch.com: “The G.O.P.’s social media account spewed sound bites from Powell and Giuliani out into the country like a fire hose attached to a sewage tank.” Fox carried the whole news conference live — uninterrupted — for virtually its entire 90 minutes.Shame on all these people.Sure, now Trump and many of his enablers are finally bowing to reality — but it is not because they’ve developed integrity. It is because they WERE STOPPED by all those people who had integrity and did the hard right things.And “shame” is the right word for these people, because a sense of shame was lost these past four years and it needs to be re-established. Otherwise, what Trump and all his sycophants did gets normalized and permanently erodes confidence in our elections. That is how democracies die.You can only hope that once they are out of power, Barr, Pompeo, Giuliani and all their compatriots will be stopped on the streets, in restaurants or at conferences and politely but firmly asked by everyday Americans: “How could you have stayed all-in when Trump was violating the deepest norms that bind us as a democracy?”And if they are deaf to the message being sent from their fellow citizens, then let’s hope some will have to face an interrogation from their own children at the Thanksgiving table this year:“Mom, Dad — did you really side with Trump when it was Trump versus the Constitution?”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The 10 swing state counties that tell the story of the 2020 election | Ben Davis

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      Looking at the results of the 2020 election at the more granular level of counties and precincts, it can mostly be defined by one thing: stasis. But beneath that stasis the results of this election and the changes from previous elections say an enormous amount about where the country is and is going. The counties that swung the most mostly fall into two categories: Latino areas swinging strongly towards Trump, and white-majority suburban areas swinging towards Biden. These 10 swing state counties were crucial to the final results, and help tell the story of what happened in 2020.Maricopa county, ArizonaHome of Phoenix and environs, Maricopa county is perhaps the most important individual county to the 2020 presidential election. The county makes up an absolute majority of the population of the swing state Arizona, and the winner of the state almost always wins the county. This year, Biden was able to flip Arizona by just over 10,000 votes, his margin coming entirely from winning Maricopa county by around 45,000. It was the first time the county had voted for the Democratic nominee for president since 1948. In many ways, Maricopa was a microcosm of the election: narrowly won by Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, containing urban and suburban areas, and having large communities of both college-educated white moderate voters and Latino voters. Maricopa was one of the linchpins of the Biden strategy of flipping white suburban voters – which he did just enough to win. Precinct results show Biden doing clearly better than Clinton in the white-majority suburban areas. They also show the result of Democrats’ failure to keep their margins among working-class Latino voters, especially in the seventh congressional district, which was carried by Bernie Sanders in the primary. Within Maricopa we can see the results of the trade-off Democrats made to win this election.Hidalgo county, TexasOn the border with Mexico, Hidalgo county, centered on McAllen, is over 90% Hispanic. Working-class and with very high rates of poverty, historically solidly Democratic Hidalgo represents the center of Biden’s failures with Latino voters and working-class voters more broadly. Hidalgo swung 23 points towards Trump, destroying any hopes Democrats had of winning Texas. Hidalgo saw a 27% increase in turnout, as Trump was able to break expectations by activating low-turnout voters to his side. Young, rapidly growing and working-class, Hidalgo is exactly the type of place Democrats need to win to enact any sort of progressive agenda in the future. For many years the conventional wisdom was that turnout in places like Hidalgo would benefit Democrats, but the consequence of Democrats’ focus on flipping white suburban voters was that these new voters were ignored by the party and Trump was able to capitalize. Like most working-class Latino areas, Hidalgo voted for socialist Bernie Sanders in the primary. Going forward, Democrats need a message of class-focused populism to build a base in communities like Hidalgo and build a progressive governing majority.Collin county, TexasThe flip side of Hidalgo county, Collin county in suburban Dallas is an example of the places that powered Biden to competitiveness in Texas and other suburb-heavy sun belt states. Collin county, like other suburbs in Texas, has long been a Republican bastion, giving enormous margins to GOP candidates up and down the ballot. George W Bush twice won Collin by over 40 points, and Mitt Romney won by over 30 in 2012. This year, however, Collin went for Trump by just four points, a 13-point swing to the Democrats from 2016. Collin and Hidalgo counties represent the twin patterns of this election: affluent white suburban areas swinging towards Democrats and working-class Latino areas swinging to Republicans.Miami-Dade county, FloridaMiami-Dade county is fairly unique politically, but you can’t tell the story of the 2020 election without talking about it. Miami and the surrounding area are heavily influenced by the politics of the Cuban diaspora, but the county is also home to many other communities. Miami-Dade saw one of the strongest swings in the country towards Trump, from going to Clinton by 30 points to Biden by just seven. While much of this was powered by Cuban-majority areas, Biden lost ground all over the county, including Black-majority areas. The immense losses in Miami-Dade are one of the biggest swings, and biggest shocks, of the election, costing two Democratic seats in the House of Representatives and putting Florida nearly out of play. The story in Miami-Dade is that the Republicans can mobilize massive numbers of working-class people who usually don’t vote. This has scrambled the entire American political landscape, and put Democrats in a precarious position going forward.Gwinnett county, GeorgiaGwinnett county, in suburban Atlanta, was key to Biden flipping Georgia. The suburbs were the first area of Georgia to support Republicans as the state moved from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican, and are now in the vanguard again as the state has moved back into the Democratic column. Gwinnett voted Republican every year between 1980 and 2012, voting for George W Bush by over 30 points twice. After going narrowly to Clinton in 2016, the county followed the pattern of suburban realignment more strongly than almost anywhere else in the country, voting for Biden by 18 points, a 75,000-vote margin. Winning big in places like Gwinnett was the key to Biden’s strategy for victory, and he was just able to do it.Lackawanna county, PennsylvaniaLackawanna county is the home of Scranton, Joe Biden’s home town, and is a longtime working-class Democratic stronghold. Lackawanna tells two stories in 2020: one of Biden doing just enough for victory and another of a permanent realignment of historic Democratic working-class areas away from the party. Lackawanna voted for Biden by eight points, a five-point swing towards native son Biden that helped push him just over the top in Pennsylvania. Biden was able to recapture enough support in north-east Pennsylvania and places like it in the midwest and north-east, combined with his increased support in the suburbs, meant that he was able to recapture the states Trump so surprisingly captured in 2016. But under the surface, the result in Lackawanna shows a long-term realignment brought about by decades of neoliberalism and declining union density and accelerated by Donald Trump. Obama was able to win Lackawanna twice by over 25 points. The 2020 result is a swing of nearly 20 points since the Obama era, despite Biden’s local connections. It is clear that many working-class regions have permanently moved away from solid Democratic status.Chester county, PennsylvaniaChester county, in suburban Philadelphia, is one of the GOP’s historical bastions, voting Republican every year but the landslide of 1964 until 2008. This year, Biden won Chester by 17 points and nearly 54,000 votes. Biden’s strength in the Collar counties around Philadelphia was crucial to his win in the state, and is the main thing keeping Democrats competitive since their collapse among voters in rural and post-industrial areas. Places like Chester form the heart of the new Democratic coalition, and Democrats will have to keep and improve Biden’s margins – and match his margins in down-ballot races – to put together governing coalitions in the future.Mahoning county, OhioMahoning county, home of Youngstown, is maybe the most powerful symbol of Democratic loss in the working-class midwest. After voting Democratic by enormous margins for decades, Mahoning went to Trump this year, the first time a Republican has won it since Nixon in 1972. Mahoning went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Obama by over 25 points twice, and even Michael Dukakis by over 25 points. Biden’s shocking loss this year shows a combination of further erosion among white working-class voters and among black voters. Mahoning represents perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the class-based New Deal coalition that has shaped American politics since 1932.Waukesha county, WisconsinCrucial Waukesha county, in suburban Milwaukee, has long been a bastion of Republicanism. This year, however, Biden’s strength with suburban voters closed the gap just enough for Biden to win the state. While Trump won by 21 points, the swing in Waukesha and the rest of the Milwaukee suburbs was just enough for Biden to win the state by around 20,000 votes. While the movement in suburban Milwaukee and the suburbs more broadly was enough to win the election for Biden, it was not as much as many Democrats expected.Northampton county, North CarolinaNorthampton county is a strong example of a serious problem for Democrats: erosion among black voters. These losses may indeed have cost Biden the state of North Carolina. Northampton county is 60% black, and this year went for Biden by 20 points. This was a five-point swing against the Democrats, and the smallest margin for Democrats in the county since the Republican landslide of 1972. Losses among black voters this cycle should be very worrying to Democrats.While the results of the election mostly show stasis, within these results, there was some confounding of expectations. First, the sheer scale of Latino defections to Trump was shocking to many. On the other hand, the swing toward Biden was enough to win the election, but below the expectations of many Democrats, and these voters often split their ticket for down-ballot Republicans, costing the Democrats a chance at a governing majority. Furthermore, the stasis in rural, white areas was a surprise itself. Many of these areas swung dramatically towards Trump in 2016, and it was expected that Biden would rebound at least a bit as there was no more room to fall for Democrats. Instead, these areas mostly stayed the same or even swung to Trump a bit. The results of 2020 confirm the huge swings and coalitional realignment of 2016 are here to stay. We head into the future with a Democratic party weaker than ever among working-class voters of all races and more reliant than ever on a wealthier, whiter and more affluent coalition. More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden confirmed as Georgia winner after recount

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      President-elect Joe Biden has been confirmed as the winner of Georgia, after the state conducted a hand recount.
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      The first Democrat to take the state since Bill Clinton in 1996, Biden wins its 16 electoral college votes as part of a victory by 306-232.
      The Associated Press called the race on Thursday evening following the recount, which election officials said reaffirmed Biden’s victory more than two weeks after election day.
      The recount resulted in officials in four counties discovering a total of about 5,800 votes. Trump has inched about 1,400 votes closer to Biden as a result, but remains the loser. The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has said that the discount was due to human error, and there was no evidence of rigging or widespread fraud.
      “Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” he added. “This is a credit to the hard work of our county and local elections officials who moved quickly to undertake and complete such a momentous task in a short period of time.”
      “The recount process simply reaffirmed what we already knew: Georgia voters selected Joe Biden to be their next president,” said Jaclyn Rothenberg, the Biden campaign spokeswoman, in an email to the Associated Press.
      “We are grateful to the election officials, volunteers and workers for working overtime and under unprecedented circumstances to complete this recount, as the utmost form of public service.”

      Donald Trump has refused to concede the race, contesting and questioning results in states including Georgia and pursuing recounts or delays in certification while making wild and unfounded accusations of electoral fraud.
      The president continued to do so on Thursday, with specific reference to Georgia, before the result was confirmed.
      But the hand recount of about 5m votes was not held in response to any suspected problems with results in Georgia or any official recount request.
      It stemmed instead from an audit required by a new state law. Selecting the race to be audited, the Georgia secretary of state, a Republican, said the presidential race made the most sense because of its significance and the tight margin separating the candidates. That, he said, made a full hand recount necessary.
      Gabriel Sterling, the official who oversaw implementation of the new Georgia voting system, said before the recount result was announced that previously uncounted ballots in four counties would reduce Biden’s margin of victory from around 14,000 to about 12,800.
      The state has until Friday to certify results certified and submitted by the counties. Once the state does so, the losing campaign will have two business days to request a recount if the margin remains within 0.5%.
      That recount would be done using scanners and would be paid for by the counties, Sterling said.
      The news came as Biden approached a record 80m votes with ballots still being counted in California and New York. Voter turnout in the 2020 election was the highest in more than a century, according to data from the Associated Press and the US Elections Project.

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      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      'Integrity still matters': the unlikely Republican standing up to Trump's voter fraud lies

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      Of all the Republicans to push back on Donald Trump’s baseless claims about voter fraud, Brad Raffensperger, the mild-mannered top election official in Georgia, did not seem like a likely candidate.
      It was just a few months ago that civil rights groups called on Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to resign from his position after voters spent hours waiting to vote in the primary election. He also faced criticism for declining to mail an absentee ballot application to all voters for the general election – something he did in the primary. And he raised alarms by creating an election fraud taskforce and trumpeting potential voter fraud prosecutions with little context.
      But after Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden by around 13,000 votes, Raffensperger has emerged as one of the few Republican officials across the US who has aggressively disputed Trump’s baseless claims that fraud tainted the election result in the state. Trump, who endorsed Raffensperger in 2018, is now directing his ire at the secretary of state, and Georgia’s two Republican senators, both locked in separate runoff contests against Democrats, have called on Raffensperger to resign.
      Raffensperger, who is quarantining after his wife tested positive for Covid-19, continued to push back on the attacks against his office on Wednesday, saying Trump’s loss in the state – long considered a Republican stronghold – was the candidate’s fault.
      “I’m a conservative Republican. Yes, I wanted President Trump to win. But as secretary of state we have to do our job,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “I’m gonna walk that fine, straight, line with integrity. I think that integrity still matters.”
      He added there were 24,000 Republicans who voted by mail in Georgia’s primary, but did not turn out to vote in November. Those voters didn’t vote again in November, Raffensperger suggested, because Trump railed against voting by mail.
      “Voters listened to the president, they didn’t show up,” he said. “That would have been a 10,000 person cushion that President Trump would have had if those folks would have come back out. They just stayed at home.”
      “Democrats really strongly pushed it,” he added. “I hope that, as a Republican, our party becomes very active.”
      Raffensperger says he has tried to use a fact-based approach to push back on false claims thrown at his state. When Republicans complained about the voting machines in Georgia, the state completed an audit on a random sampling of machines in six counties and found no tampering.
      “We keep trying to knock down these rumors. But it’s like whack-a-mole. It’s a rumor mill not supported by fact,” he said.
      He noted that the CDC said just before election day that voters with Covid-19 could vote in person, which might have scared off older voters from showing up at the polls. More

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      Lindsey Graham condemned for allegedly pressuring Georgia to toss out ballots

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      Democrats and political observers were quick to condemn the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, after it was reported that he pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to exclude ballots in the state’s presidential recount.
      In a tweet, Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar called the alleged approach “insane and illegal”.
      Hakeem Jeffries, a US representative from New York, asked: “Did Lindsey Graham illegally pressure the Georgia secretary of state to rig the election after the fact? The justice department should find out.”
      Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, said: “For the chairman of the Senate committee charged with oversight of our legal system to have reportedly suggested that an election official toss out large numbers of legal ballots from American voters is appalling.”
      Graham, from South Carolina, should resign his role as chair of the judiciary committee, Bookbinder said.
      Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Georgia by just under 15,000 votes, the first time the state had gone for a Democrat since 1996. A hand recount was ordered, and is expected to be completed by 20 November.
      It is unlikely to change the result. If it did, the state’s 16 votes would not change the overall result in the electoral college, which Biden won 306-232. The threshold for victory is 270.
      Nonetheless, Trump refuses to concede defeat and continues to peddle debunked conspiracy theories regarding voter fraud and electoral irregularities which election officials from both parties have dismissed as baseless.
      Raffensperger told the Washington Post Graham had indicated he should find ways to toss out legal mail-in ballots.
      “It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.
      Counties administer elections in Georgia, making Raffensperger powerless to do what Graham apparently wanted.
      “It was just an implication of, ‘Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out,’” Raffensperger told CNN.
      Graham told the Hill the claim was “just ridiculous” and that “if he [felt] threatened by that conversation, he’s got a problem.
      “I actually thought it was a good conversation,” the senator said, adding that he was “surprised to hear [Raffensperger] characterized it that way”.
      On Tuesday, Graham said he had spoken to election officials in several battleground states, where a dwindling group of Trump allies continue to push his baseless claims.
      “Yeah, I talked to Arizona, I talked to Nevada,” Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill.
      He was forced to clarify that he had spoken to the Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, not Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state, after she said she had not spoken to Graham.
      Raffensperger has faced mounting criticism from his own party for defending the state’s electoral process. He told the Post he had received threatening messages from “people on [his] side of the aisle”, demanding that he “better not botch” the recount.
      Georgia’s two senators, David Perdue and Kelley Loeffler, have called for his resignation. Both face tight run-off elections.
      Graham’s alleged approach to Raffensperger prompted widespread criticism in the mainstream media.
      Writing for the Post, the conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin asked why Graham “would need to know this information and decide directly to contact Raffensperger.
      “Federal and/or state law enforcement should get to the bottom of this, requiring both parties to the conversation, and any witnesses, to preserve evidence. Graham’s actions have called into question his willingness to uphold the sanctity of elections.” More

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      Will Trump’s refusal to concede help his base turn out in Georgia’s runoffs?

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      Donald Trump’s refusal to admit defeat in the 2020 presidential election won’t stop President-elect Joe Biden from taking office in January. But it is having a lasting and divisive impact on the American electorate and that might be exactly what Republicans have in mind as they gear up for a Democratic White House.Biden has easily surpassed the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to win the the presidency and he has won millions more raw votes than Trump. But Trump has refused to concede and while he has publicly – and baselessly – argued that the election results show widespread voter fraud favoring Democrats, the president has also reportedly queried advisers about additional ways to stall or stop his departure from office.Those options are increasingly unlikely yet Trump’s campaign team has also continued to file lawsuits and recounts in key states challenging how the vote-counting process happened. Similarly those lawsuits have been unsuccessful.But other political strategists and veterans of transitions see another incentive: keeping Republican voters energized for upcoming Senate elections in Georgia, which could decide which party controls the Senate in 2021.That thinking goes that if voters are still paying attention to politics through November and December instead of taking a break because major elections have been decided, they are more likely to donate and come out to vote in Georgia (if they live there).That is vital in that keeping control of the Senate will give Republicans a powerful weapon to hobble Biden, frustrating his policy agenda and even limiting who he can pick for his cabinet posts.The strategy – and the attendant creation of a powerful myth of a stolen election – could also serve to keep many Republican voters motivated in midterm elections in 2022 and eventually the next presidential election in 2024. It could help Republican aims of reducing the Democrats to a single term in the White House in which they will be unable to achieve major policies, especially if Republicans continue to win more House seats.This refusal to accept Biden’s victory to varying degrees has sparked a high level of concern among veterans of past presidential transitions.“I think that there’s some truth to that and there’s some truth to defending for the sake of defending it in order to, again, rally this portion of the base that are the diehards, which I think is a minority but it’s an important minority to the party,” said Beth Noveck, who served on the transition team for Barack Obama.“So what all of this means about the future of the Republican party and the direction it will take and the role Trump will play and the cult of personality, it’s a very calculated political move to keep the base energized and demonstrate the kind of ‘pitched battle’ mentality of the other guy is the enemy is to maintain that sort of, frankly, rather fascist position.”But some Republicans worry that the larger Republican universe focusing on arguing that the election is flawed could actually backfire in Georgia. They fear it could even depress Republican turnout in Georgia as voters might wonder ‘If that election wasn’t legitimate, why should the Georgia elections be different?’ and ultimately not come out to match a highly enthusiastic Democratic voter base.At the same time, other Republicans see Trump’s loss and the opportunity to reinforce Republican numbers in Congress as a motivator for voters.“The last four years the singular message for Democrats has largely been around President Trump and when he’s gone how much of a motivator is that for him? And while Georgia may have delivered an electoral victory to Biden it’s by such a narrow margin I don’t think that anyone can buy into the idea that these voters are also wanting to give Biden a blank checkbook by giving him both the House and the Senate,” said Republican strategist Tim Cameron.Cameron added that for Democrats, “the last four years their rallying cry has been Trump and Russia stole this election from them and subsequently we’ve seen record-level turnouts in 2018 and 2020 and I don’t know why why we expect this to be any different for Republicans now that Biden’s president. If anything it may lead to record levels of Republican turnout in 2022. It’s too soon to say that but I just wouldn’t discount this.”There are signs that Trump’s quixotic arguments against the election results are dividing the country, creating a mass of people who see the election of Biden as illegitimate even as millions of Democrats celebrate his win.A recent Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 70% of Republicans don’t feel the election was free and fair. Only a few Republican lawmakers have openly acknowledged Biden as the legitimate victor out of the presidential election, most have either said that the outcome of the election is still unclear or that Trump is within his rights to wait until every last vote is counted, including the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, the highest-ranking Republican in the chamber.Here’s how this must work in our great country: Every legal vote should be counted. Any illegally-submitted ballots must not. All sides must get to observe the process. And the courts are here to apply the laws & resolve disputes.That’s how Americans’ votes decide the result.— Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) November 6, 2020
      The Republican National Committee, the main political arm for the president, has been encouraging these arguments as well. RNC talking points obtained by the Guardian urge supporters to argue that “The fight is not over. President Trump will continue to fight for us, and we will continue to fight for him” and “allowing these recounts and lawsuits to run their course will ensure that all Americans can be confident of the results of the election”. More

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      Georgia’s secretary of state says Lindsey Graham suggested he throw out legal ballots

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      Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has said that Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether it was possible to invalidate legally cast ballots after Donald Trump was narrowly defeated in the state.
      In an interview with the Washington Post, Raffensperger said that his fellow Republican, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, questioned him about the state’s signature-matching law and asked whether political bias might have played a role in counties where poll workers accepted higher rates of mismatched signatures. According to Raffensperger, Graham then asked whether he had the authority to toss out all mail-in ballots in these counties.
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      Raffensperger was reportedly “stunned” by the question, in which Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to throw out legally cast absentee ballots.
      “It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.
      Graham confirmed the conversation to reporters on Capitol Hill but said it was “ridiculous” to suggest that he pressured Raffensperger to throw out legally cast absentee ballots. According to Graham, he only wanted to learn more about the process for verifying signatures, because what happens in Georgia “affects the whole nation”.
      “I thought it was a good conversation,” Graham said on Monday after the interview was published. “I’m surprised to hear he characterized it that way.”
      Trump has refused to accept results showing Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, falsely blaming rampant fraud and irregularities that election officials in both parties have dismissed as meritless.

      Georgia, a reliably Republican state with 16 electoral votes, is currently conducting a hand recount of roughly 5m presidential ballots, which is expected to be completed by 20 November. Biden led in the state by about 14,000 votes after the initial tally.
      This comes as Raffensperger faces mounting backlash from his own party after defending the state’s electoral process. The state’s two Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both locked in tight run-off elections to keep their seats, have called for Raffensperger’s resignation – calls that Raffensperger has dismissed.
      Congressman Doug Collins of Georgia, who is spearheading the president’s effort to prove fraud in the state, has also been critical of Raffensperger, accusing him of siding with Democrats because he refused to endorse the false claim that the election was stolen from Trump. In the interview, Raffensperger called Collins, who has not contested the result of the special election race he lost to Loeffler, a “liar” and a “charlatan”.
      Raffensperger said every accusation of voter fraud would be thoroughly vetted but there was currently no credible evidence that wrongdoing had occurred on a large enough scale to affect the outcome of the election. He also told the Post that the recount would “affirm” the results of the initial count and prove the accuracy of the Dominion voting machines, which Trump has falsely claimed deleted votes cast for him.
      Voting rights and ethics groups condemned Graham’s comments, and some called for his resignation as chair of the Senate judiciary committee.
      “Not only is it wrong for Senator Graham to apparently contemplate illegal behavior, but his suggestion undermines the integrity of our elections and the faith of the American people in our democracy,” said Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, in a statement. “Under the guise of rooting out election fraud, it looks like Graham is suggesting committing it.” More