Three outspoken critics of President Donald Trump have asked the Senate ethics committee to investigate South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham over his conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger about the Peach State’s election recount.
Law professors Claire Finkelstein of the University of Pennsylvania and Richard Painter of the University of Minnesota and Walter Shaub, director of the United States Office of Government Ethics during the Obama administration, implied in a letter that Graham “suggested that Secretary Raffensperger disenfranchise Georgia voters by not counting votes lawfully cast for the office of president.”
Graham, the Senate judiciary committee chairman, has denied any coercive actions or implications.
"I'm asking him to explain to me the system," Graham said.
"If you send a mail-in ballot to a county, a single person verifies the signature against what's in the database," Graham said. "They don't mail out ballots. You got to actually request one. So they expanded mail-in voting, and how you verify the signature, to me, is the big issue of mail-in voting."
"If you're going to have mail-in voting, you got to verify the person who signed the envelope is also the person"
In their letter to ethics committee Chairman James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, and ranking minority member Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, the three Trump critics claimed the discussion was improper.
“On its face, this explanation suggests misconduct,” the letter said. “Any call by a sitting chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to a state election official during an ongoing count of votes is inherently coercive and points to an attempt to influence the outcome of the ballot counting.”
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