Warnock called winner in Georgia; Perdue race still too close to call

The Republican Senate majority now hangs on by the weakest thread, and is likely to fall in the next day or two after Raphael Warnock took his race against Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Sen. David Perdue narrowly trails Jon Ossoff with tens of thousands of votes left to count in heavily Democrat areas. 

Networks projected Warnock as the winner over Loeffler early Wednesday morning, with a nearly 55,000-vote lead into Wednesday afternoon.

Ossoff holds a 17,500 lead over Perdue, and the race is still officially too close to call, Fox News reported.

Around 89,000 votes are left to be counted in the state, not including military ballots that may have additional time to arrive.

Recounts likely

Both races are currently within the one percent margin that would permit a recount to be requested, and both Republican candidates have vowed to keep fighting until all legal votes are counted.

Over 3 million voters sent their ballots through the mail or voted early, and this time those votes were allowed to be loaded into machines early but not tabulated until the polls closed. The idea was to speed up the counting so that it won’t take weeks to count all the votes like it did in the general election.

Already, there are allegations that fraud may have taken place in the runoffs. Professor John Eastman, who is representing President Donald Trump in legal action against Georgia, addressed a pro-Trump rally on Wednesday morning and said that his team observed fraud within the Dominion voting machines as votes were tallied.

After the counting allegedly stopped for the night, more votes were added to the total from a “secret folder” in the machine, Eastman said. Looking at the percentage of votes that were counted, Eastman said the “denominator” kept increasing even though counting wasn’t supposed to be happening.

Supreme Court petition pending

Eastman said a Supreme Court petition detailing the allegations related to the 2020 election is pending. For Trump to overturn the Electoral College, however, he would need to flip at least three states where Biden currently has leads.

During a joint session of Congress where the Electoral College vote had begun to be certified, protesters from the earlier rally broke security barriers and entered the Capitol Building after scuffling with police. The session had to be recessed, and lawmakers were told to shelter in place while order was restored.

Trump had called for Vice President Mike Pence to send electoral votes back to contested states after at least five state legislatures wrote letters asking for time to reconsider their certification of the states’ election results.

Pence said Wednesday he didn’t have constitutional authority to send electors’ votes back to states once they had been certified.

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