As state officials in Georgia insist that no fraud took place during last month’s election, President Donald Trump’s legal team presented seemingly shocking footage to state senators, which they say reveals blatant cheating.
“It looks like Vice President Biden will be carrying Georgia, and he is our president-elect,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told reporters on Wednesday, after a second recount failed to overturn Biden’s 12,000-vote lead over Trump in the state. Furthermore, Raffensperger warned Trump to tone down his “violent rhetoric” and accept that “he obviously lost” the election.
With Georgia’s counties due to certify their results before noon on Friday, Trump is far from conceding. At a hearing before the State Senate on Thursday, Trump campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani asked witnesses to present evidence of alleged election fraud to Republican lawmakers, with one video in particular standing out.
The video footage, captured from CCTV cameras inside a counting center at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, purportedly shows staff there retrieving suitcases of ballots from underneath a table and counting them, long after counting had officially been paused and poll workers sent home on election night.
Trump’s team estimated that several thousand ballots could have been counted in the two hours when nobody else was present in the arena.
The video caused uproar among conservative pundits on Twitter, and Trump himself tweeted that the apparent “ballot stuffing... leads to an easy win of the State.”
Some on the right called on Republican lawmakers and the Department of Justice to investigate the videos. Pro-Trump pundit Sebastian Gorka demanded that Attorney General William Barr “get off your duff” and look into the allegations.
Barr, however, declared on Tuesday that his department has not yet “seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” The courts too have not been kind to Trump, with lawsuits in multiple swing states thrown out of state and federal courts. Trump’s legal team, however, insists that bringing these cases before the Supreme Court is its ultimate goal.
Until these cases reach the nation’s highest court, hearings similar to Thursday’s session in Georgia have taken place in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan in recent days. As in Georgia, poll workers and other witnesses in these hearings presented evidence of alleged fraud to Republican lawmakers, in a bid to challenge Biden’s apparent victory in these states.
Time is running out for Trump to claw back victory. The Electoral College meets in less than two weeks to cast its final vote, and even though the Republican lawmakers who control the state legislatures in all of these states could send their own electors to Washington, none have thus far signaled that they would.
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