GOP congressman thinks it's weird that so many people voted by mail last year

A Georgia congressman suggested Monday that an increased number of absentee ballots returned in the 2020 election in his state proves there was voter fraud. He has seemingly forgotten that the election took place during a global pandemic.

Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) made the comments at a rally with Mike Pence in support of Georgia’s Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. Loeffler and Perdue are facing Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, respectively, in runoff elections Tuesday for their Senate seats after they failed to win majorities in November.

Though the video is at times hard to make out, Scott reportedly noted at the rally that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama received fewer than 100,000 absentee votes in their presidential races in the state. “And Joe Biden somehow, some way ended up with 850,000 absentee ballots in the state of Georgia,” he complained. “Now something’s not right with that. Something’s not right with that. And he may end up getting sworn in as president.”

President-elect Joe Biden won Georgia — a state that was last won by the Democratic presidential candidate in 1992 — by almost 12,000 votes in November. Donald Trump continues to push for officials to overturn that result and claims to have been the real winner.

Larger numbers of voters cast mail-in ballots in 2020 than in previous elections — in Georgia and across the country — rather than risk contracting or spreading the coronavirus by appearing in person at the polls.

The U.S. Elections Project reported that 101,453,111 voters cast early ballots, with 65,642,049 of those cast by mail.

Biden encouraged voting by mail, while Trump strongly opposed it — except in the case of people in his own inner circle.

And much of the Democratic vote was in fact cast using mail-in ballots.

But Scott’s own reelection came with an increased number of absentee votes this year as well.

In November 2018, Scott received 198,152 votes in his unopposed race for reelection in Georgia’s 8th Congressional District, 8,629 of them sent in by mail.

In November 2020, Scott won with 198,701 votes, 29,629 of them sent in by mail.

Trump received 451,157 votes by mail in Georgia in November — a massive increase over the 102,766 he received there in 2016.

In Georgia, more than 667,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus to date. One of those was Scott himself, who tested positive in late November.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.