Ethics experts ask Senate to investigate Graham’s probe of mail-in voting

A trio of ethics experts who have been outspoken critics of President Trump called on the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Sen. Lindsay Graham’s (R-S.C.) communications with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) regarding mail-in votes.

Former federal ethics watchdog Walter Shaub, George W. Bush-era ethics lawyer Richard Painter and Claire Finkelstein, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, wrote a letter asking Senate Ethics Committee Chairman James Lankford (R-Okla.) and ranking member Chris Coons (D-Del.) to investigate whether Graham “suggested that Secretary Raffensperger disenfranchise Georgia voters by not counting votes lawfully cast for the office of president.”

The letter says “your Committee should demand clarity as to whether Senator Graham has threatened anyone with a Senate investigation of the Georgia vote tally and/or taken steps to initiative such an investigation.”

Raffensperger said in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday that the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman had asked him if he had the authority to toss out ballots in counties with high rates of nonmatching signatures. Graham also allegedly questioned if poll workers had accepted ballots with nonmatching signatures due to political bias.

Graham, who says he has also spoken to officials in other states, has denied that that was the basis of his Friday conversation Raffensperger.

“What I’m trying to find out was how do you verify signatures for mail-in ballots in these states,” he told reporters on Monday. “I thought it was a good conversation. I’m surprised to hear him characterize it that way.” 

Asked why, as a senator from South Carolina, he’s talking to an elections official in Georgia, Graham said that “it affects the whole nation.”

Georgia is one of several states where President Trump, who has refused to concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden, has made baseless allegations of voter fraud.

In an interview with The Hill published Wednesday, Raffensperger said politicians are engaging in “emotional abuse” against voters with their unsubstantiated claims of fraud.