If he didn’t intend to address lingering conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election, a heckler ensured that he would.
At the start of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s speech to the Kiwanis Club of Augusta, an unidentified man paraded a handwritten posterboard sign through the River Room at St. Paul’s Church.
The premise behind the man’s message – that the elections chief “betrayed Georgia” by distributing millions of absentee ballots throughout the state – was incorrect, Raffensperger said.
Instead, as the pandemic began its spread through Georgia, Raffensperger said his office decided to counter what were likely to be multiple ballot applications mailed to Georgia voters by various entities.
“What we actually did, is we actually sent out to all registered voters absentee ballot applications, not ballots,” he said.
When Election Day arrived and President Trump lost Georgia, despite two statewide recounts, investigations by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Justice Department and Trump’s recorded call to Raffensperger asking him to “find 11,780 votes,” many remain unclear about the chain of events.l
“People to this day wonder what exactly happened,” Raffensperger said.
What happened was about 24,000 people skipped voting for a president on the 2020 ballot, he said. As other statewide Georgia Republicans cruised to victory, “that’s why President Trump came up short,” he said.
The day before his call to Raffensperger, Trump had learned through his own investigation that the thousands of dead voters he claimed in the call did not exist, Raffernsperger said.
The Fulton County video characterized by Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani as election workers sneaking hidden ballots into the mix had a simple explanation. After they quit for the day, the workers were told to resume work, so they “pulled the unscanned ballots back out,” he said.
For those needing additional confirmation, Raffensperger suggested Columbia County District Attorney Bobby Christine, appointed earlier by Trump as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District.
“Guess who else looked at it?” Raffensperger said. “The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District. Because the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District had resigned, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District was appointed by President Trump to specifically look at what, and he did a deep dive in that,” Raffensperger said.
The elections chief plugged the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, from which three Republican-led states recently withdrew, after Trump criticized it. Approximately 30 states share voter data to ensure voters registered in one state can’t vote in another.
“ERIC is the only multi-state organization that’s out there. The states own it. It’s not run by the feds. It’s not run by an outside organization,” he said. “We think it’s an objective way of updating our voter rolls.”
The conduct of elections and role of elections officials “should be a nonpartisan, bipartisan issue,” he said.
“In other words, our job when we run elections in Richmond County, in Columbia County is to make sure we walk the line of integrity,” he said.
