10 months ago
ATLANTA — Many election officials fear that Donald Trump's continued efforts to delegitimize the 2020 vote is setting the stage for more turmoil in 2024. Don't count Brad Raffensperger among them.
Georgia’s secretary of state, who famously rebuffed Trump’s pressure to “find” enough votes to flip Georgia’s 2020 vote, argues the state is in a better position now than it was four years ago to combat efforts to cast doubt on the presidential election.
“I don't want to seem naive about this or Pollyanna-ish,” Raffensperger said in an interview at his office in the Georgia State Capitol. “But I think in many respects, Georgia is moving forward a lot farther than some other states.”
Raffensperger’s confidence about 2024 stands out in a moment when many election officials worry the next general election will be a major test of the country's democracy. Trump’s steady efforts to discredit the 2020 election, they fear, is reverberating into 2024, fueling rising threats against election workers and eroding voter confidence. The emergence of hyper realistic artificial intelligence only threatens to exacerbate the spread of mis- and disinformation.
Raffensperger — the state’s top election official — is himself still trying to combat the false allegations from 2020. In a National Review op-ed last week, he broke down state voting numbers from 2020 to stress that there was nothing amiss about the count. Trump’s allegation that the election was stolen “through voting-machine irregularities, foreign intervention, or out-and-out fraud has become repetitive, boring and sad,” he wrote.
Seated beneath a painting of a bald eagle a local artist gifted him after his refusal to bend to Trump’s pressure in 2020, Raffensperger rattled off a list of reasons why 2024 will be different — even if it's the same two candidates atop the ticket.
Georgia recently passed a law that tightens oversight of absentee ballot drop boxes — a constant target of election conspiracies following 2020 — and empowers the state to conduct reviews of underperforming county election officials. As a result of the last election, the state also has more experience combatting disinformation, he said, while the end of the pandemic will make election workers’ jobs easier across the board.
But the biggest single difference between 2020 and 2024, he argued, is that he and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp both pushed back against Trump’s narrative of electoral fraud while traveling the state for their 2022 reelection campaigns. Both won by wide margins.
“I think it's very helpful to have me as a Republican, a conservative Republican, go out and talk to my fellow conservatives to give them the facts,” said Raffensperger, who said he published the op-ed for the same reason. He argued in that piece that Trump lost because tens of thousands of Republicans, off-put by his polarizing style, opted to stay home.
While Raffensperger was focused on Georgia’s improvements over the last three years, other battleground states have also modified their election administration practices — like how quickly they count votes and how they plan to audit the results — to build confidence with voters and leave less oxygen for conspiracies to take root.
Raffensperger mentioned another reason for confidence in Georgia in 2024 that might ring hollow for some: the fact that the state has now run two successful elections with the $100 million touch screen voting machines it purchased from Dominion Voting Systems in 2019.
Earlier this month, in a district court house less than a mile away from his office, a federal civil trial kicked off about whether those systems are so susceptible to hacks it violates Georgia voters’ constitutional rights. Dominion, which is not a party to the case, has defended its voting systems as some of the most heavily scrutinized in history.
Raffensperger declined to comment on the merits of the ongoing litigation.
But he and other state officials have previously argued that the risks of an election-changing hack are overblown. They also blame the case for fueling Trump's rhetorical and legal challenges to the 2020 election, which often centered on allegations that Dominion conspired to flip votes from Trump to President Joe Biden.
Bad-faith actors seeking to delegitimize the election and those who have supported the lawsuit are “cut from the same cloth in our opinion, yes,” Gabriel Sterling, the secretary of state’s chief operating officer, testified in the case last week.
For all the fiery rhetoric, Raffensperger's defiance of Trump came at great personal cost.
He and his wife Trish received a wave of threats and harassment from Trump supporters for months after his call with the then-president, he testified to the House’s Jan. 6 committee in 2021. At one point, Trump supporters even broke into the house of his daughter-in-law, he said then.
Roughly two and half years later, Raffensperger said the threats against him and those in his office had mostly subsided. And while he acknowledged those risks might tick back up in another contested election, he said he was optimistic the country was turning a corner.
“Both political parties are realizing election denialism is not an effective election strategy,” said Raffensperger, who was also critical of Democrat Stacy Abrams for blaming her 2018 governor’s race loss on voter suppression.
Election denialism can “really wreak havoc with society,” he said. But, “it doesn't work. Voters are smart.”
Asked whether he’d vote for Trump for president in 2024, Raffensperger sidestepped and said he isn’t in the business of endorsing candidates. “I don't want people to feel that somehow I'm tilting the playing scale towards my political party,” he said.
It’s clear, though, he isn’t stoked about Trump’s stunning political revival.
During the interview, he repeatedly opined on the GOP’s former champions, men like Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower, who he said left a legacy of hope, fun and respect.
“That’s the spirit of the Republican party I love,” he said. “The big question is how do we get it back.
English (US)