WASHINGTON: Georgia’s Repu­blican top election official said on Monday the White House had pushed him against his better judgement to take a call from President Donald Trump in which he pressured the state to overturn his November presidential election defeat there.

In the call on Saturday, Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his election loss in the southern state, according to a recording published by US media.

“I never believed it was appropriate to speak to the president but he pushed out, I guess he had his staff push us. They wanted a call,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

A state Democrat has called for a probe into whether Trump had violated Georgia election law on the call. Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected Trump’s assertions of electoral fraud in the hour-long conversation.

“We took the call, and we had a conversation. He did most of the talking, we did most of the listening,” Raffensperger said.

“But I do want to make my points that the data that he has is just plain wrong. He had hundreds and hundreds of people he said that were dead that voted. We found two. That’s an example of just his bad data.” Trump for two months has been claiming contrary to evidence that his loss to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud. Multiple state and federal reviews, as well as courts, have rejected those claims as unsupported.

Biden won the state-by-state Electoral College by 306-232 and carried the popular vote by more than 7 million ballots.

The only Democrat on Georgia’s election board, David Worley, asked Raffensperger to investigate whether the president had violated state law that prohibits solicitation to commit election fraud.

“To say that I am troubled by President Trump’s attempt to manipulate the votes of Georgians would be an understatement,” Worley wrote on Sunday in a letter to Raffensperger.

Raffensperger said the district attorney in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, might be the appropriate authority to carry out such an investigation. The county’s district attorney, Fani Willis, did not immediately return a request for comment.

In another blow to Trump, staunch conservative US Senator Tom Cotton refused to sign on to a long-shot campaign by nearly a dozen other fellow Republicans in the US Senate this week to challenge Biden’s victory, warning it was outside of Congress’ power and would “establish unwise precedents.”

In a statement on Sunday, Cotton said he would not join his colleagues Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and others in defying Republican Party leaders by objecting on Jan 6 when lawmakers meet to tally the votes in the Electoral College — a largely symbolic act of certification.

Published in Dawn, January 5th, 2021