President-elect Joe Biden won the state by about 12,000 votes in the November election.
Mike Pence told Georgia voters on Thursday that he hopes the U.S. Supreme Court throws out all of their votes from the 2020 election.
His comments came at a rally for Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue (R-GA), both of whom are facing a January runoff for their respective seats.
"President Trump deserves his day in court: the Supreme Court," Pence told attendees. "And all I can say is God bless Texas!"
Pence was referring to a last-ditch lawsuit, filed on Monday by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeking to overturn the 2020 election results from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — four of the five states that flipped from Donald Trump in 2016 to President-elect Joe Biden in 2020.
Without presenting any evidence of specific election fraud, Paxton asked the high court to order new elections in each of the states based on the fact that different states conduct elections differently.
Trump and has allies have filed and lost dozens of other legal challenges to his November defeat, though their baseless allegations of fraud and cheating have been debunked by media fact-checkers, election officials of both political parties, and many judges — even some Trump appointees.
Though legal experts and even many Republicans have dismissed this latest lawsuit as virtually certain to fail, Trump has endorsed it as "the big one."
Pence made the comments while campaigning for Loeffler and Perdue — but both candidates advanced to their Senate runoffs by finishing in the top-two in the same November Georgia election as Texas seeks to set aside. If the Pence believes that election was invalid, it would seemingly also throw into question their legitimacy as runoff candidates.
Though several top Georgia Republicans officials have defended the integrity of the November vote in their state, some have actually backed Texas' attempt to disenfranchise their constituents. Loeffler and Perdue put out a joint statement endorsing the Texas lawsuit and Reps. Rick Allen, Buddy Carter, Drew Ferguson, and Austin Scott all signed an amicus brief in support on Thursday.
Ironically, one of the arguments made in the Texas suit is that Georgia and the other states improperly made it easier to vote by mail during the 2020 elections because of the pandemic. But that did not stop Pence from using Thursday's rally to urge Georgia Republicans to use that very system for the runoff.
"You can actually request an absentee ballot today," he said, referring them to the state's online voter information portal. “Our great GOP state chair David Shafer and the senators will tell you, we’re on it this time. We’re watching. So get an absentee ballot today. Don’t wait. Get it done."
There has been no evidence thus far of any widespread election fraud and even Trump's closest allies, such as Attorney General Bill Barr, have confirmed as much.
"[T]o date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election," Barr told the Associated Press in an interview on Dec. 1.
Responding to demands from Trump and his allies that the Justice Department overturn the election results that they wrongly believe were fraudulently achieved, Barr added, "There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all ... Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. ... And those have been run down; they are being run down."
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
