Two Democrat Senators-elect who won runoff elections in Georgia earlier this month saw their victories certified by the Secretary of State Tuesday, despite lingering questions regarding election integrity in the Peach State.
“Senators-elect Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff have now been certified as Georgia’s next senators, and can soon be sworn in,” WXIA said Tuesday.
Warnock and Ossoff defeated Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively, in a January 5 runoff election.
NBC’s Frank Thorp V reported that the pair will be sworn in Wednesday, giving the Democrats control of the U.S. Senate via Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris, who will hold the tie-breaking vote.
“The Senate has received the certificates of election and commissions for the two new Georgia Senators, a Senate source tells NBC News,” Thorp reported.
The Senate has received the certificates of election and commissions for the two new Georgia Senators, a Senate source tells NBC News.
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) January 19, 2021
Democrats will also control the U.S. House and the Presidency.
Despite the certification of the election results in Georgia, questions remain.
The Peach State was a hotbed of strife after the November 3 election, when President-elect Joe Biden was declared the winner by just fewer than 12,000 votes. Republicans then lost the runoff elections, too, prompting Secretary of State officials to blame elected members of the GOP, including President Donald J. Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA-14) for the losses.
In reality, the Secretary of State’s office did not help its own cause.
In an election conducted more heavily by mail than any other in the state’s history, chain of custody documents for 500,000 absentee ballots from the November 3 election were never produced, as reported by The Georgia Star News.
The Star News also reported that 78 percent of a sampling of 89,000 ballots dropped in absentee ballot drop boxes in Cobb County were not returned to election officials within the proper timeframe, as dictated by State Election Board Emergency Rule 183-1-14-0.8-.14.
That rule says that “ballots from the drop box shall be immediately transported to the county registrar and processed and stored in the same manner as absentee ballots returned by mail are processed and stored.”
But most ballots took several hours, and in some cases, even days, to be transferred to election officials.
Amid the controversy, an audit of absentee ballots was conducted in Cobb County, the parameters of which were apparently not for public consumption.
The Star News made several attempts to confirm with the Secretary of State the exact process by which the votes were audited, only to be ignored on every occasion.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a contributor at The Georgia Star News and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Jon Ossoff” by Jon Ossoff.
