U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA-09) said this week that election season is over in Georgia and government officials must now secure the integrity of how people vote.
Clyde submitted a column to The Washington Examiner and said state-level officials during this year’s session of the Georgia General Assembly are prioritizing the issue of voter integrity. He also seemed to criticize Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for how he managed last year’s elections.
The Washington Examiner published Clyde’s column Thursday.
In the column, Clyde wrote that “so many states allowed fringe operators to bypass the power of their legislative bodies, and in doing so, knowingly trampled the U.S. Constitution.”
“In my home state of Georgia, we saw one of the most egregious examples in the country of the state’s legislative powers being overruled. In March 2020, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger entered into a Compromise Settlement Agreement and Release with the Democratic Party of Georgia, unilaterally altering the state’s statutory requirements for the examination and authentication of signatures on absentee ballots,” Clyde wrote.
“This agreement effectively bypassed the signature verification requirement mandated by Georgia law — a clear violation of Article II, section 1, clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, as well as state law itself, which mandates that any election regulation must be ‘consistent with law.’”
Members of Raffensperger’s staff did not return The Georgia Star News’ repeated requests for comment Friday.
But Clyde wrote that Raffensperger delivered a letter to Congress this month. Raffensperger, in his letter, said he had no reason to doubt Joe Biden won Georgia’s electoral votes.
“But Raffensperger is missing the point,” Clyde wrote.
“He did not say evidence of fraud did not exist. We can all agree that the 2020 presidential race was a highly unusual election across the board due to events both inside and outside of the government’s control. Combined with the unusual number of allegations, it is easy to see why so many people have lost faith in our democratic process. We cannot simply ignore this fact by putting the allegations off-limits to investigation.”
Staff for Georgia Speaker of the House David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge) did not return The Star News’ request for comment Friday on how and when he and other members of the state legislature will address the matter of voting integrity.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
