“On January 6, I will vote to give President Trump and the American people the fair hearing they deserve and support the objection to the Electoral College certification process,” said Loeffler in a statement on his official Twitter account.
Loeffler will launch a separate effort from a dozen of his fellow Republican senators who have said they will challenge Democratic President-elect Joe Biden’s victory during the certification vote. At least 140 House Republicans will also object to certification.
Just minutes before Loeffler’s tweet, his Georgia Republican colleague, Senator David Perdue, tweeted a clip of his Fox News interview on Sunday, in which he said he is asking his colleagues to oppose it.
“I am encouraging my colleagues to object. This is something that the American people demand now,” he said. “There are huge irregularities in Georgia. They need to be investigated and corrected, in my opinion.”
Loeffler and Perdue are in the middle of tight electoral disputes in Georgia, where they will face their respective Democratic opponents, Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, on Tuesday – the day before the certification vote.
Raffensperger, a Republican, oversaw three different recounts of the November vote in the state and conducted several other reviews of the process. He recently commissioned the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to conduct an audit of the Cobb County signature matching system, which determined the system to be 99.9% accurate and revealed no evidence of fraud.
Perdue not only said he would encourage his colleagues to oppose Trump’s defeat, but also said that he himself should have won in November, despite not having reached the 50% limit required to avoid a runoff.
So far, Loeffler and Perdue had avoided the question of whether to accept the results of the presidential election. Both are staunch supporters of Trump and neither recognized Biden as the elected president.
Before making her statement, Loeffler left open the possibility that she could object to the results of the Electoral College. On December 20, CNN asked Loeffler what his plans were for this week’s vote and she said, “Everything is on the table now. This president fought for us, we are fighting for him. We need to have free and fair elections. But also we need to ensure that Georgians vote on January 5th. “