On January 6, hours after a crowd loyal to outgoing President Donald Trump attacked the United States Capitol in a vain attempt to overthrow President Joe Biden’s victory over Trump, Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA) made his own attempt to overturn that election. Hice was one of several members of the US House who opposed the certification of Biden’s victory in Hice’s home state of Georgia.
It was not the first time that Hice attempted to install the 2020 election loser in the White House. In December, Hice was one of 126 Republican members of Congress who unsuccessfully urged the Supreme Court to prevent several key states from certifying Biden’s victory.
Now, however, Hice wants to become Georgia’s top electoral officer – a position that could potentially empower you to skew future elections in favor of Republicans. He announced on Monday that he will run for Georgia’s next secretary of state.
“Free and fair elections are the foundation of our country,” said Hice in a statement that released less than three months after trying to reject the result of a free and fair election in his home state of Georgia. Hice also promised to “aggressively” pursue “those who commit electoral fraud”.
Although Trump spent much of 2020 spreading false fears of electoral fraud, real fraud is extremely rare. An examination of 100 million votes cast in the state of Oregon found only about a dozen cases of fraud. After the 2016 election, the North Carolina State Election Council conducted an audit to determine how often voters committed fraud at the polls. He found only a potentially fraudulent vote of 4,769,640 ballots cast in that election. Similar studies in Iowa and Wisconsin found similar results in other elections.
However, while several studies and audits, some of them conducted by senior Republican officials, have found that electoral fraud is virtually a non-issue, false fears of such fraud are often used to justify the difficulty of voting. Georgia Republicans are currently promoting several new voting restrictions, with many proponents of this legislation claiming that it is necessary to combat fraud.
If Hice had been Georgia’s secretary of state in 2020, he could have triggered a crisis. Days before the January 6 coup on Capitol Hill, Trump called Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to “find 11,780 votes” for Trump – Biden beat Georgia by 11,779 votes.
But Raffensperger declined, and a recording of that call was leaked to the Washington Post. An Atlanta prosecutor is currently investigating “attempts to influence the 2020 General Election administration in Georgia,” and Trump could face criminal charges.
Hice’s statement announcing his offer to take over as Raffensperger makes it clear that Hice sees Raffensperger’s decision to honor the results of the 2020 elections as unacceptable. “What Brad Raffensperger did was to create cracks in the integrity of our elections,” says Hice.
Trump endorsed Hice shortly after the congressman announced his candidacy.