Defeated Republican senator claims Georgia election was ‘stolen’ from him ahead of Trump visit

Republican David Perdue, who lost his Georgia Senate seat last year, has now claimed that the election was “stolen” from him.

Former President Donald Trump, who has been the most notable source of similarly false election fraud claims after losing the White House in 2020, will rally with Mr Perdue on Saturday in support of his attempt to unseat the Republican Governor of the state, Brian Kemp.

Mr Trump began attacking Mr Kemp after he wasn’t, in Mr Trump’s view, supportive enough of his efforts to overturn the results in Georgia, a state that President Joe Biden won, the first Democrat to do so since President Bill Clinton in 1992.

“Look, the energy level is still up in Georgia,” Mr Perdue said on Voice of Rural America. “Most people in Georgia know that something untoward happened in November 2020. In fact, I’ll just say it ... in my election, in the President’s election – they were stolen.”

“The evidence is compelling now, not the hyperbole that you saw come out right out to the election by people from out of the state. But just the court case that we saw last year,” he added.

“The court ruled in that case against Fulton County that the evidence was compelling and the judge ruled to unseal the ballots in Fulton County,” Mr Perdue said.

“He later dismissed that case ... because he said that voters ... do not have legal standing when it comes to a fraud civil case. I have refiled that suit now and I want to find out if a candidate has legal standing,” he added.

“And if they do, then I think we’ll be able to get the judge to unseal those ballots, but we have plenty of facts coming out right now,” he claimed.

In December of last year, Mr Perdue filed a lawsuit seeking a review of absentee ballots from the 2020 election, The New York Times reported at the time. The legal filing was based on Mr Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

The lawsuit was filed in the Superior Court of Fulton County and states that election officials in the county “circumvented the majority vote of the people of the State of Georgia and thereby affected the outcome of the statewide General Election on Nov. 3, 2020 in several races”.

Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, is the most populous county in the state where many Democratic voters reside.

The lawsuit presents claims that officials “negligently, grossly negligently or intentionally engaged in and/or permitted multiple unlawful election acts”.

“David Perdue wants to use his position and legal standing to shine light on what he knows were serious violations of Georgia law in the Fulton absentee ballot tabulation,” Perdue lawyer Bob Cheeley told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in December.

The 2020 Georgia results have been reviewed three times, each time certifying Mr Biden’s victory.

In January 2021, Mr Perdue lost his seat to Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff.

Mr Perdue’s legal filing is similar to that of a group of voters, led by a conspiracy theorist, who sued to review all the 147,000 absentee ballots in Fulton County.

Judge Brian Amero of Henry County Superior Court threw out that lawsuit, ruling that they lacked standing and that they were unable to show specific injury or harm. Since Mr Perdue was a candidate in the 2020 elections, he may be able to find a path around part of that ruling.

But fellow Republicans criticised the lawsuit. Kemp spokesman Cody Hall told The New York Times in December that “David Perdue is so concerned about election fraud that he waited a year to file a lawsuit that conveniently coincided with his disastrous campaign launch”.

“Keep in mind that lawsuit after lawsuit regarding the 2020 election was dismissed in part because Perdue declined to be listed as a plaintiff,” he added.

Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who has faced fierce criticism from Mr Trump and the GOP for resisting Mr Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, said in a statement that “fake Trumpers like Perdue are trying to curry favor with the Trump base by pushing election conspiracy theories that everyone — including the voters they are hoping to attract — knows they don’t really believe”.

“It is reprehensible that David Perdue is peddling those same dangerous lies in a sad ploy for attention,” the Georgia Democratic Party told the Times in a statement at the time. “From David Perdue’s frivolous lawsuit to Brian Kemp’s voter suppression laws — both based on the same fabricated lies — nobody who sows distrust in our free and fair elections deserves to lead our state.”