Sen. Raphael Warnock responded Monday to an op-ed by Georgia’s secretary of state that called him an “election denier” over his remarks on voter suppression.
“I have to spend a lot of time shooting down false claims about our elections in Georgia,” Brad Raffensperger wrote in The Wall Street Journal Sunday. “Usually they come from losers. But sometimes even victorious candidates make false claims about our elections.”
Raffensperger referred in part to Warnock’s victory speech after winning a runoff for Georgia’s Senate seat earlier this month, in which Warnock said, “Just because people endured long lines that wrapped around buildings some blocks long, just because they endured the rain and the cold and all kinds of tricks in order to vote, doesn’t mean that voter suppression does not exist.”
Raffensperger wrote, “I thought I had heard every conspiracy theory there was after the 2020 election, but the idea that Republicans control the weather to make it harder for Democrats to vote is a new one. … And I don’t even know what Mr. Warnock means by ‘all kinds of other tricks.'”
In an exclusive interview with “CBS Mornings” on Monday, Warnock responded, saying, “The fact that people have had to overcome barriers doesn’t mean those barriers don’t exist.”
“We literally saw college students and seniors in lines that were hours and hours and hours long,” he said. “Maybe [Raffensperger is] happy with that. I’m not. I think we can do better than that.”
Warnock’s runoff election victory this month gave Democrats their 51st seat in the Senate and gave him his first full six-year term, after having previously won a special election for the seat in 2021. He is the first Black American to represent Georgia in the Senate and the first Black Democrat elected to the chamber from a southern state.
His win came amid what he and other Democrats viewed as voter suppression efforts from Republicans, who have pointed to the state’s high voter turnout to rebut those claims.
Republicans in the state said after Warnock’s win that concerns over a 2021 law imposing new restrictions on voting were overblown. Democrats, however, believe voters made their voices known despite those obstacles.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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