Georgia's vote recount, which must be finished by midnight Wednesday, is a "fight for every legal vote," Rep. Doug Collins, who is leading President Donald Trump's recount team in the state, said Monday.
"It's also a fight to make sure that illegal votes don't count," the Georgia Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "The important part is restoring that confidence. It had to be done this way."
Trump on Saturday labeled the recount, announced by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, last week, as a "waste of time" because matching signatures weren't being shown for the ballots, and claimed officials won't allow his campaign's observers to be in the counting rooms.
Presumptive president-elect Joe Biden holds a slim lead of just over 14,000 votes over Trump in Georgia and has been projected by several news outlets as having won the state.
Collins Monday said reports are still coming in about issues with the Georgia election, adding that the Trump campaign still wants to hear from anyone who had issues.
"A lot of people need to realize the lawsuits that have been filed outside the campaign, but also the count itself, need to continue," said Collins. "(There are) real issues with signature verification, with what happened in the consent decree … it gutted the way we do signature verification here in Georgia."
There have been reports that the recount won't make a large difference in Georgia's results, but Collins said he's waiting for the numbers to come back in.
"The question is, do we want 100 percent accuracy or 98.5?" said Collins. "People need to be sure that their ballot actually counts.
Collins also addressed the calls from some Democrats to move temporarily to Georgia to vote for their party members in the upcoming Senate runoff races and warned that people who do that would be committing a felony.
"If they come to do that, they will meet the law in Georgia and I don't think they will like it very much," said Collins.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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