State Representative Tim Fleming on Tuesday fended off a candidate who had echoed President Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential race to win the Republican runoff for Georgia’s top elections post, The Associated Press said.
Should he triumph in November’s general election to become Georgia’s next secretary of state, Mr. Fleming would succeed Brad Raffensperger, who by defying Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results became a hero to some and a villain to others. Mr. Raffensperger finished a distant third in last month’s Republican primary for governor after being battered by Trump loyalists as a “Judas.”
Mr. Fleming is hardly a Raffensperger acolyte. He expressed concern with election “irregularities” in 2020. One of Mr. Raffensperger’s top aides, Gabriel Sterling — the only candidate in the Republican secretary of state field to defend Georgia’s 2020 election results — finished a distant fourth in the five-person contest.
Mr. Fleming has said the state has since improved its election system, and that he was not running on “conspiracy theories.” He also did not go nearly as far as Vernon Jones, a Trump loyalist who finished second in the primary and the runoff, in calling the 2020 results fraudulent.
Instead, Mr. Fleming trumpeted his experience as a top aide to Gov. Brian Kemp, when Mr. Kemp served a secretary of state in the 2010s.
