Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate David Perdue on Thursday pledged to create a new police unit that would probe voter fraud, in order to appeal to supporters of former President Donald Trump who continue to question the validity of the 2020 presidential election, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The law enforcement unit would give Georgians confidence that only legal votes will be counted, according to Perdue, who served in the US Senate from 2015 until January 2021.
Perdue said he would push for state election results to be independently audited.
Kemp, a onetime ally of Trump, has been castigated by the former president for certifying the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia, which the governor was required to do by law after Joe Biden's victory in the former Republican stronghold.
Perdue's push to establish an "Election Law Enforcement Division" in Georgia came during the same week that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida unveiled details for an election police force, which elicited broad opposition from Democrats.
The new unit would give the state's executive branch more power over election investigations, according to a CNN report.
The proposal from Perdue comes as the Republican candidate has continued to rail against Georgia's election administration, calling for Absentee ballots to be inspected in Democratic-leaning Fulton County and insists that he would have declined to certify the state's election results if he had been governor.
In 2020, Biden defeated Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million votes cast, while the president received 2,473,633 votes, or 49.5%.
Perdue was endorsed by Trump after Kemp refused to entertain the former president's election-related pressure campaign.
Perdue criticized the governor on Thursday, saying that Kemp should be left to sit on his hands when needed the most. Georgians lost confidence that their vote would count after he failed them.
Perdue said that the new police unit would look into election crimes and give Georgia voters a sense of security regarding the integrity of the vote.
There was no evidence of mass voter fraud in the critical swing state after three presidential ballot counts in Georgia and the failure of multiple lawsuits initiated by Trump campaign attorneys in court.
Last year, the Republican-controlled legislature passed the Election Integrity Act of 2021, which restricts ballot drop boxes to early voting sites and limits their usage to voting hours, among other measures.
Hall told the Journal-Constitution that Perdue's entire campaign is a lie.
He said that the proposal recognizes that governors have no legal authority in the oversight, administration or investigation of elections.
In November, the winner of the Republican gubernatorial primary will face the former Democratic state House Minority Leader, who is one of the nation's most prominent voting-rights activists. Kemp narrowly defeated Abrams by a small margin.
The margin of victory was the smallest since 1966.
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