“I don’t care whose feet it steps on and I don’t care if they call me a Trumpster.”

Those were the defiant words of Republican District 4 Guilford County Commissioner Alan Branson, who, with his attorney Chuck Winfree, has now filed a second protest over the District 4 commissioners’ race that had Branson’s Democratic opponent Mary Beth Murphy ahead by 70 votes after the general election votes were tallied.

A recount this week provided Murphy with a couple of additional votes – but Branson said the recount also provided him with a window to file a second protest in the race.

“Absentee mail-in voting is a friggin’ disaster,” Branson said. “These outcomes are tainted. People may say I’m a poor loser, but there is some bad, bad juju in this process.”

Before this week’s recount, Branson filed a protest questioning the legitimacy of some votes that were counted by the Guilford County Board of Elections, but a spokesperson for the NC State Board of Elections told the Rhino Times that the protest was “untimely.”

Branson said this week that the recount opened up a new window of time to file a protest and said that’s what he did. Like President Donald Trump, Branson maintains that there were multiple issues in this election – many related to mail-in ballots – that may have altered the outcome of the election.

Though three new Guilford County commissioners, including Murphy, are scheduled to be sworn in on Monday, Dec. 7, Branson said he is “not dead yet” when it comes to holding his seat.

His protest claims that there were 464 ballots in Guilford County counted that should not have been counted due to a variety of issues such as a lack of required witness information or the fact that ballots were sent to the Guilford County Board of Elections from other county Boards of Elections.

Branson said that there were enough questionable District 4 related ballots to alter the outcome of his race.

The new protest calls for election officials to correct the vote count but acknowledges it is not clear if doing so will change the current outcome.