Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in an interview that conservative voters need to head to the polls in the Georgia Senate runoffs in spite of their concerns about election integrity, to deliver a large margin of victory for GOP candidates that would erase any potential machinations on the left.
“If you’re a conservative, you have to vote,” Gingrich told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” on Dec. 11. “We need to win by a bigger margin than the left can steal. So we need to get every single conservative out.”
The Senate runoff, which pits Sens. David Perdue (R-Ga.) and Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) against Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, is key for both parties, with control of the upper chamber hanging in the balance. Republicans currently hold a 50-seat majority in the Senate, but if Democrats win both runoffs and also prevail in the contested presidential election, they’ll have control of the White House as well as both chambers of Congress.
“These two runoffs are probably the most important runoffs in American history,” Gingrich said. “They have the potential to change the whole direction of the country.”
If Democrat Joe Biden is sworn in as president and if Ossoff and Warnock win in Georgia, Gingrich said, “Biden will have a signal, he will be very radical.”
“I think this is a huge decision point for the country,” he added.
Gingrich referred to the ongoing controversy over presidential election-related irregularities and claims of fraud in Georgia, saying, “I personally have no doubt that Trump won more votes than Biden did, and that the difference, basically, was theft.”
He said “there’s good reason for people to be concerned” and that he would like to see an election integrity and reform movement take shape in the future “to dramatically reform the election process to get back to honest elections.”
Before such an initiative is launched, however, he said election integrity-related steps would likely be taken around the Georgia runoffs, including the Republican National Committee monitoring all of the ballot drop-boxes and GOP poll watchers observing county clerks as they send out ballots.
“I think you'll just see a much tighter process of one, turning out our vote with a much bigger turnout, the vote effort, and two, making it much, much harder to steal.”
Gingrich said one of the reforms should be to change the absentee ballot law so that each ballot could be connected back to a voter during a recount.
“Right now, you have 1.2 million absentee ballots, and they’re basically just a big lump. I mean, once they took the ballot out of the envelope, they got rid of the envelope, and so you have no way of going back and having an honest recount, because you don’t know where the ballots came from.”
Asked whether the added security measures in place for the runoffs would address this issue, Gingrich said, “We think that we’re making it harder, that’s the way I would put it.”
“I think that there will still be some cheating, but I think that the amount of time and effort being put into policing it is dramatically bigger than it was in November,” he said.
“This is illogical for any Republican to think that, ‘Oh, I’m just going to sit down and not vote,’” Perdue said in the interview. “We know what’s at stake. This is the last line of defense against their radical liberal agenda that once they do this, we won’t get it back.”
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