One-on-One Interview with candidate Rep. Jody Hice

ATLANTA, Ga. (CBS46) - Rep. Jody Hice (R) is leaving congress to run for Georgia Secretary of State, making the 2020 election the rationale for his run. If elected, he says, he’d decertify Joe Biden’s win; a move legal scholars say isn’t even possible. But it’s not stopping Hice, who’s trying to knock off fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger in the May 24th primary.

Hice has represented Georgia’s 10th congressional district in Washington since 2015, but he’s giving up his seat in a reliably Republican district, he says, to restore Georgians’ confidence in their elections.

“That really has been the driving force to step up to the plate,” he tells CBS46 anchor Rick Folbaum. “And to challenge what I believe has been an abysmal performance from our current Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.”

Rewind to Dec. 6, 2020, the day Sec. Raffensperger recertified Biden’s win. “We have now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged,” he exclaimed, angering President Trump and millions of other Republicans who believed Trump’s false assertion that the election had been stolen.

Hice still believes it. Or at least that’s what he says. “Well, I mean, you begin with (Raffensperger’s) unilateral decision to send out an absentee ballot request to everyone on our voter registration file, knowing that our voter registration file is grossly inaccurate,” Hice says, detailing his primary beef with the man he’s trying to unseat.

As for decertifying Biden’s win, a remark he made to an undercover Democratic activist in a now-viral video?

“Yes, the process needs to be done to decertify. Who wants to say the election was wrong? But we’re not going to do anything about that to get to that point. I understand. It’s, it’s an extremely,” he stops himself before admitting, “I don’t even know just what all is involved.”

I asked Congressman Hice what would have happened if he’d been on the receiving end of that now-infamous phone call when President Trump told Sec. Raffensperger, he wanted to literally “find” him enough votes to win.

“Would you have agreed, had you been Secretary of State, to help him find him those votes,” I asked him?

Hice was ready with an answer. “In the first place, had I been Secretary of State that phone call would have never happened.”

Rep. Hice says there was a quote “abundant” amount of fraud in 2020. But the former president‘s lawyers never presented any evidence of it in court, losing more than 40 lawsuits, including at the U.S. Supreme Court.

For this next go around, Hice says Georgia state lawmakers have addressed some of Republicans’ concerns.

“They passed SB 202, for example. A great step in the right direction,” he says. “It doesn’t answer or deal with all the issues, but it’s certainly a great step in the right direction of trying to close the gaps of the election integrity that have been widely opened by Secretary Raffensperger. And so look, I think coming into this upcoming election, we do have what we did not have before SB 202. We do have the eyes of the country, literally, that are watching Georgia.

Early voting, which ends May 20, has proved very popular this election season. Totals are breaking records, with most people casting ballots in person. Election day is next May 24.

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