Georgia's top election official wants to eliminate runoffs after incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock defeated Donald Trump’s hand-picked GOP candidate Herschel Walker in a December runoff that solidified Democrats’ control of the U.S. Senate.

“Georgia is one of the only states in the country with a General Election Runoff,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said on Dec. 14. “We're also one of the only states that always seems to have a runoff. I’m calling on the General Assembly to visit the topic of the General Election Runoff and consider reforms.”

In the Nov. 8 general election, Warnock won more votes than Walker and Libertarian third-party candidate Chase Oliver. Oliver peeled off just over 2 percent of the vote – but that slight percentage was enough to prevent either Warnock or Walker from passing the 50 percent threshold to prevent a runoff.

In Georgia, if no candidate in a general election wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates must square off four weeks later in a runoff election. That system has roots in a 19th century racial segregationist strategy used mostly in the South to block Black voters’ political influence.

Republicans in Georgia have suffered stunning runoff defeats recently. In 2021, Warnock, an Atlanta pastor, unseated incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler. It was a political one-two punch, as Democrat Jon Ossoff defeated Republican David Perdue in the same year to give Democrats control of the U.S. Senate.

Raffensperger highlighted the burden runoffs inflict on Georgia voters and election staff.

“No one wants to be dealing with politics in the middle of their family holiday. 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,” he stated.

Raffensperger’s statement urged state lawmakers to “select from a wide range of options” to address the runoff system when the GOP-dominated General Assembly convenes in January.

In the aftermath of Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, GOP-dominated state legislatures, including Georgia’s, passed at least 42 restrictive voting laws in 21 states. But a racist component was involved. A Brennan Center analysis found that the new laws were more prevalent in red states with racially diverse populations.

Those lawmakers claimed that the array of restrictive voting laws were needed to prevent fraud, even though conservative groups audited key states whereTrump lost in 2020 and irrefutably debunked allegations of widespread voter fraud.