Republican Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan said Monday that he believes the presidential election in his state was run in a “fair and legal” way and it was not rigged.
“I believe the election was fair and legal. It certainly was close,” Duncan told CNN’s “New Day.”
“The person I voted for didn’t win but that doesn’t change my job description,” Duncan said, referencing his belief that President Donald Trump did not win the state. (RELATED: Lindsey Graham: ‘If We Don’t Fight Back In 2020, We’re Never Going To Win’ The Presidency Again)
He acknowledged that the election might have produced concerns and questions but that state officials “continue to chase down all the one-off leads … like we would probably see in any other election.”
When asked if it was a “hard question to answer” whether the election was rigged, Duncan responded, “No, it wasn’t hard at all.”
At a Saturday night rally in support of a Senate runoff election in Georgia, Trump repeated his unproven claim that “hundreds of thousands of illegal votes were cast in each state,” and he insisted that election authorities “literally” threw out Republican poll watchers on election night.
“And that is true in Georgia certainly,” Trump said.
Presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani also insisted during a Sunday interview that he has 1,000 affidavits that prove “massive fraud all throughout the country. There are 1,000 affidavits of people who observed a fraudulent act.”
Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has also encouraged the Georgia state legislature to change its state law that does not require comprehensive signature authentication. (RELATED: Geraldo Rivera Calls For ‘A Real Gut Check,’ Says Trump Is ‘On The Wrong Course’ To Help Georgia Republicans)
“I can’t change Georgia law,” he told Fox News Wednesday. “So we need to change the law so that the Senate races are not stolen from us.”
But Duncan said Monday that he is confident that the election was not stolen by anyone. “This isn’t a third world country here in Georgia. We’ve been running elections for a long, long time … we all try to hold each other accountable and make sure our standards are as high and as modern as possible.”
When asked what the certification of the recount would mean, Duncan replied, “I think it’s going to validate the processes and procedures that we’ve gone through for nearly five weeks now and I believe that count is going to verify what we originally came up with and that is [President-elect] Joe Biden is going to win the state of Georgia … and he’ll be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States.”
Both supporters and opponents of President Donald Trump have said that his allegations of voter fraud are unfounded and that the campaign’s election lawsuits largely lack evidence.
In a Wall Street Journal column, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove said that he can find “no evidence” of systemic voter fraud in the presidential election.