Georgia Speaker of the House David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge) said this week that members of the state’s GOP will suffer a “bloodbath” in 2022 if they continue to allege that voter fraud occurred during the 2020 elections.
Ralston made those remarks to the Atlanta-based WABE, which is affiliated with National Public Radio.
“We’ve got important work to do,” Ralston reportedly said.
“Those of us in the House of Representatives are going to govern.”
The Georgia Star News contacted Ralston’s office Wednesday and asked why the speaker thinks this way and what evidence he had to back up his reported statements. We also asked whether former Republican senator and declared gubernatorial candidate David Perdue’s concerns about alleged election fraud in Fulton County prompted the speaker’s remarks.
No one in Ralston’s office returned our requests for comment before Wednesday’s stated deadline. The Star News also asked whether members of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce influenced the speaker’s remarks.
Former State Representative Jeff Jones said in March that the Georgia Chamber of Commerce influences Ralston’s agenda as speaker, even though that agenda favors large corporate entities and sometimes frustrates average Georgians’ best interests. Jones said “the Georgia Chamber of Commerce is not the friend of the average Georgia citizen.”
“Here lies one of the fundamental problems with the Georgia House side is [that] so many members are more interested in being on the inside [and] being under the good graces of Speaker Ralston, getting their committee chairmanships, and being included on the inside of the power structure, more so than they are interested in doing the right thing by the people in their districts here in Georgia,” Jones said at the time.
As of February, Georgia’s chamber of commerce interests had donated $4,250 to Georgia State Representative Bonnie Rich (R-Suwanee) since 2018, shortly before she took office. Georgia State Rep. Charlice Byrd (R-Woodstock) said that month she suspected members of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and the Metro Atlanta Chamber worked behind the scenes to kill Byrd’s Voter ID legislation. She said Rich worked to block Byrd’s legislation in a Special Committee on Election Integrity subcommittee.
Byrd said she believed Georgia Chamber members disliked her Voter ID legislation because it would try to stop non-citizens from voting. She went on to say that “they think it will stop Green Card people from coming into our state to work.”
Representative David Clark (R-Buford), alleged last year that Ralston promised former President Donald Trump he would use his power and influence to convene a special session of the Georgia General Assembly. This for the purpose of reviewing the qualifications of electors in the aftermath of the November 3, 2020 election. Clark further alleged Ralston lied to the president when he said he would collect enough signatures to convene a special session.
Members of the Georgia General Assembly last year pushed Governor Brian Kemp to call a special legislative session before the U.S. Senate runoff elections last January.
The special session did not happen. Had such a special session occurred then state legislators would likely have addressed the appointed presidential electors and the implementation of laws limiting voter fraud in the general election runoff.
Kemp, last December, would not use his authority to change the date of the state’s two U.S. Senate elections from January 5 to February 1 of this year. Moving back the date might have given members of the Georgia General Assembly additional time to coordinate and develop ways to prevent potential election fraud.
– – –
Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Background Photo “Georgia Capital” by andre m. CC BY-SA 3.0.
