- Trump-endorsed Georgia governor candidate David Perdue says he wouldn't have certified the 2020 election.
- Perdue, a former Republican senator, is challenging GOP incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022.
- Two recounts affirmed Trump's presidential election loss in Georgia.
Former Sen. David Perdue, who is challenging Gov. Brian Kemp for governor in Georgia, says he wouldn't have certified the 2020 election had he been in Kemp's shoes last year.
Perdue has been endorsed by President Donald Trump, who aggressively sought to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia and faulted Kemp for not backing his baseless claims of election fraud or calling a special legislative session to address them. Trump, in endorsing Perdue, said "the liberals and RINOs have run all over [Kemp] on Election Integrity."
"Not with the information that was available at the time and not with the information that has come out now. They had plenty of time to investigate this. And I wouldn't have signed it until those things had been investigated and that's all we were asking for," Perdue told Axios in explaining why he wouldn't have certified the election.
Perdue did not specify what "information" has come out since the 2020 election that throws the outcome of the presidential race into doubt, had or what "things" he would have wanted to be investigated before certifying the 2020 election in his comments to Axios.
A statewide risk-limiting audit, which involved a full hand recount of the presidential race, and an additional statewide machine recount requested by the Trump campaign confirmed that Trump lost the state of Georgia to President Joe Biden. Kemp certified the election twice, first after the initial count and then after the second recount.
Neither the Trump campaign nor any other plaintiffs successfully proved their allegations of election improprieties in a court of law. The Trump campaign lost a case seeking to halt certain absentee ballots from being counted in the days following the election, lost subsequent attempts in state and federal court to overturn and "decertify" the presidential election results altogether, and then voluntarily dropped all four of its lawsuits challenging the election results in Georgia on January 7.
"Rather than presenting their evidence and witnesses to a court and to cross-examination under oath, the Trump campaign wisely decided the smartest course was to dismiss their frivolous cases," Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who is also facing a Trump-endorsed primary challenger, said at the time.
It is also unclear how long Perdue would have wanted the election to be "investigated."
In presidential elections, states risk losing the guarantee of Congress counting their electoral votes if they don't certify their votes and appoint their electors by the Monday after the second Wednesday in December. This deadline played a role in the Florida 2000 election dispute, when the Supreme Court ruled on the day of the safe harbor date to award Florida's electoral votes to former President George W. Bush.
Perdue was on the ballot in November 2020 election and was forced into a January 5 runoff election which he lost to now-Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.
The former senator also told Axios that if was governor, he would have called a special legislative session to "protect and fix what was wrong for the January election."
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