Georgia elections board member calls for probe into Trump's call seeking to change election result

vt-author-image

By VT

Article saved!Article saved!

David J. Worley, an Atlanta lawyer and the only Democrat on the state election board in Georgia, has called on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to investigate potential civil and criminal violations committed by Donald Trump during a phone call over the weekend, it's reported.

Worley said that a transcript of the hour-long conversation, a recording of which was obtained by the Washington Post, gave “probable cause” to suspect that Trump had violated the election code in Georgia.

“It’s a crime to solicit election fraud, and asking the secretary to change the votes is a textbook definition of election fraud,” Worley said during an interview Sunday with the Post.

Trump
Credit: 1128

In a letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Worley said that “such an incident, splashed as it is across every local and national news outlet, cannot be ignored or brushed aside."

Per The Post, in the hour-long recording made of a phone call on Saturday (January 2), the outgoing president can be heard speaking to Raffensperger, asking him to find votes in the state of Georgia to help overturn the election in order to defeat current president-elect Joe Biden.

You can listen to the recording in question in the video below:
[[youtubewidget||https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE20HAkOhDM]]

While insisting that he had won the election in Georgia, Trump can be heard espousing a number of unfounded claims - at one point telling Raffensperger that he could be held criminally liable if he refused to report the ballots.

Trump goes on to make unverified claims that ballots had been shredded by the Biden campaign and that voting machinery was removed from Fulton County.

At one point in the recording, Trump states:

"All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.

"The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry, and there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated.

"You know what they did and you're not reporting it. That's a criminal offence. You can't let that happen. That's a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer."

Per BBC News, Raffensperger can be heard replying:

"Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong. We did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.

"You have people who submit information and we have our people that submit information, and then it comes before the court and the court has to make a determination. We have to stand by our numbers, we believe our numbers are right."

Addressing the leaked recording in a tweet made to his 88.5 million followers made on January 3, Trump later wrote:

"I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the 'ballots under table' scam, ballot destruction, out of state 'voters', dead voters, and more. He has no clue! [sic]"

However, Raffensperger himself defiantly retweeted Trump, writing in reply: "Respectfully, President Trump: What you're saying is not true. The truth will come out."