“Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger today called on the Georgia General Assembly to eliminate General Election Runoffs in the state. ‘I’m calling on the General Assembly to visit the topic of the General Election Runoff and consider reforms.’ The General Assembly convenes in January and could select from a wide range of options to address this topic to help further the goal of safe, secure, and efficient elections. No one wants to be dealing with politics in the middle of their family holiday,’ said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. ‘It’s even tougher on the counties who had a difficult time completing all of their deadlines, an election audit and executing a runoff in a four-week time period,'” says a statement from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

It’s interesting that Raffensperger says this now and not after the 2021 runoff where his fellow Republicans, now former Senators David “Chickenshit” Perdue and Kelly “Left-Eye” Loeffler, were defeated by Dems Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock, respectively. It’s not clear if what Raffensperger proposes would’ve stopped Warnock from taking the seat on election day in November 2020 given that was a multi-candidate special election, but Perdue would have defeated Ossoff. Now that Herschel Walker came in second against Warnock in both rounds this year, it really seems like Raffensperger just wants the hassle over with rather than a “We lost, so let’s change the rules to make it easier to win” sort of thing that’s all the rage with Republicans these days.

The irony of the January 5th, 2021 double-header – which saw over a billion in combined spending by both sides as control of the Senate hung in the balance – was that Georgia’s runoff system is a historical relic of Jim Crow election rigging, created in 1964 to make it easier for racist Southern Democrats to defeat Republicans by diluting the Black vote in the second round. So the system really worked as intended in 2021 – minus the “racist” and “by diluting the Black vote” parts.