Georgia
Georgia Republican warns Trump is inciting
violence over election: 'Someone will get hurt'
Gabriel Sterling tells president to soften his
language or ‘someone is going to get killed’
Guardian
staff and agencies
Wed 2 Dec
2020 02.02 GMTFirst published on Wed 2 Dec 2020 00.04 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/01/georgia-election-republicans-trump-gabriel-sterling
One of
Georgia’s top election officials has made an impassioned plea to Donald Trump
to tone down his rhetoric disputing the election results, saying the president
is “inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence”.
Gabriel
Sterling, a Republican who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting
system, also issued the stark warning that if Trump does not rein in his
supporters then “someone is going to get hurt”.
“Mr
President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia,” Sterling said
at a press conference on Tuesday, during which he became visibly angry. “We’re
investigating, there’s always a possibility, I get it. You have the rights to
go to the courts. What you don’t have the ability to do – and you need to step
up and say this – is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of
violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone
is going to get killed, and it’s not right. It’s not right.”
Sterling,
the voting systems manager for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said
last week that he had police protection around his home because of threats he
received after election results were announced. Trump lost Georgia to Biden by
around 13,000 votes.
Sterling
also said that the wife of Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger,
had received “sexualized threats”.
Raffensperger
has been the target of constant attacks from the president over his defeat in
Georgia, and he recently told the Guardian he had received death threats. Last
week, Trump had called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people”, Sterling noted,
adding: “That helped open the floodgates to this kind of crap.”
Sterling
said his anger boiled over when he learned that a contractor helping with the
state’s recount received death threats after someone shot video of him
transferring a report to a county computer and falsely said the young man was
manipulating election data.
President
Trump responded to Sterling’s plea by tweeting making baseless claims about the
election Georgia and criticising the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp.
Twitter flagged his tweet.
Sterling’s
plea came as another top Georgia Republican, the state’s lieutenant governor,
also spoke out against baseless claims of election fraud.
In an
interview with CNN, Geoff Duncan called the amount of election misinformation
“alarming”.
“It’s certainly
disheartening to watch folks willing to kind of put their character and their
morals out there just so they can spread a half truth or a lie in the efforts
to maybe to flip an election,” he said. “That’s not what democracy is all
about.
“Long term
I think we hurt the brand of the Republican party, which is certainly bigger
than one person,” he added.
Tensions
are high in Georgia, where two runoff elections in January will determine the
shape of the US Congress, either by cementing a Republican Senate in opposition
to Joe Biden’s presidency or giving the Democratic party a hold on the White
House, the House and the Senate.
To
underline the importance of the battle, Trump, who has made hardly any public
appearances since his 3 November election defeat, will be rallying in the state
on Saturday.
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