In a phone call leaked by The Washington Post on Jan. 3, President Trump asked the Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger to change the election results in Georgia. 

During the call, Trump claimed that more than 250,000 ballots with forged signatures were dropped throughout Georgia and that even more ballots had no signatures at all. He claimed that if Raffensperger’s team investigated a second time, 11,780 fraudulent Biden ballots would be found within minutes- enough to overturn the current election results in Georgia. 

Despite Trump’s confidence in these claims, Raffensperger and his team said that the ongoing investigations have found no evidence of this. 

“Let me tell you what we are seeing,” said Ryan Germany, an attorney on Raffensperger’s general counsel. “What we’re seeing is not at all what you’re describing. These are investigators from our office, these are investigators from GBI, and they’re looking, and they’re good. And that’s not what they’re seeing.” 

The Trump administration believes that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent and has been trying to change the outcome ever since Biden was declared the winner on Nov. 7, 2020. The first method to achieve this goal was filing lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona; this was not effective. 

Junior Joshua Robinson believes that the phone call shows that the Trump administration has diverged from lawsuits and is now taking a new approach. 

“I think the call shows that Trump is desperate, and he is now willing to break the law to win,” said Robinson. “Another possibility, I think Trump may be so detached from reality that he may genuinely believe that he won the election and that there was massive fraud.”

Though the leaked call caused outrage among Democrats, and even contains evidence of Trump breaking federal law, according to some lawyers and legal scholars, many Republicans say that Trump did not go too far with the phone call. 

Junior Morgan Landry said that all Trump did was try to get Georgian officials to look into other possibilities of fraud, so nothing was wrong with the call. 

“I think that [the election results] should be looked at. If nothing is wrong, then nothing will be changed. If something is wrong, then it needs to be fixed,” said Landry. “There should not be harm in verifying that the election was 100% accurate.”