Katie sat down with Georgia’s Secretary of State to talk Trump, trust, and the role new voting laws could play in midterms.
Four days before rioters descended upon the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent congress from certifying President Biden’s win, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger received a call from President Trump, urging him to alter the state’s results of the presidential election. When the Secretary refused to accept Trump’s false data and upheld the results of the recount, many people considered him a hero in the name of democracy. He has since written a memoir, Integrity Counts, about the 2020 election and has also voluntarily testified to the January 6th Commission.
Katie spoke with Secretary Raffensperger about the one-year anniversary of his conversation with the President, trust in the democratic system, and the role disinformation and new voting laws could play in the midterms.
KATIE: It’s hard to believe Secretary Raffensperger, that it’s been a year since you got that now-infamous call from President Trump. Can you remind people what was said on that call?
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER: In the phone call, President Trump had a lot of data. Unfortunately, all of his data was wrong. And so just politely and respectfully, I corrected everything he had been led to believe.
He said there were 5,000 dead people who had voted. His people actually filed 10,315 in a lawsuit and I told him there were two. And since that time we found two more. So that’s a total of four dead people that voted in the state of Georgia. And since then they’ve been referred over to the Attorney General’s office for prosecution. He said there were 66,000 underage voters. There were zero. They said that there were thousands of felons. We found less than 74. And they said there’s about 2,400 non-registered voters that had voted. And we found zero of those.
Why do you think the president and other members of his administration were so misled?
I think probably, as it relates to Georgia, probably shock. Georgia has been a reliably Republican presidential state for over 20 years. And then, all of a sudden, this last election, it flipped. But if you look at our demographics, in 2018, Governor Kemp won by 55,000 votes and I was in the runoff. So the state was much more competitive. Here are the facts: 28,000 Georgians skipped the presidential ballot. And yet they voted down-ballot. And in the Republican congressional areas, Republican congressmen got 33,000 more votes than President Trump. That’s the story. That’s what happened in Georgia.
Why did they skip the presidential contest?
Well, you’d have to ask those 28,000 that skipped it.
In addition to pressing you on false claims about voter irregularities, the President asked you something that was pretty shocking. What was it?
Well, he asked us to find 11,780 votes — one more than he needed to win the state. We’d gone down every trail, every single allegation to just make sure we didn’t miss anything. And we knew, at the end of the day, there weren’t 11,780 votes to be found.
One hundred and twenty-six Republican members of Congress urged the Supreme Court to stop President Biden’s victory. And fewer than half of Republicans say that they’re willing to accept the results of the 2020 election. Why do you think that’s the case?
I think, in many cases, it’s a lack of moral courage. They’re just afraid about what would happen to them – that they’d be primaried and that they would somehow lose their position. But you have to make a choice in life. And I think you really need to lean into integrity, honesty, and character.
In your book called, Integrity Counts, you write about your concern that we’re entering a new era of candidates contesting elections and refusing to accept the results…
I think when people then start with these stolen election claims, it really destabilizes society. And it really feeds on that grievance politics that we’ve seen for so long. I understand that people are hurting and they’re hurting at both ends of the spectrum, I get that. But we have fair, honest elections in Georgia and I think we have them across the country. And I think we need to come to the reality that when people lose elections, they lose because they got fewer votes.
In your book, you talk about the 60 days of disinformation that took place between the election and your conversation with President Trump on January 2nd. What role did disinformation play?
Huge. It just really spun people up and people were so angry, so mad. And some of the stuff that was spun up, number one was that the machine flipped the votes. And then when we did a 100% hand recount with the machine, so the machine count was then compared to what the hand count was, they were remarkably close. So that proved two things: that President Trump did not win the state of Georgia and the machines did not flip the votes. But yet even today, we get questions about, ‘oh, we need to go back to hand counting and we need to go back with hand marking, hand-counted ballots,’ but the machines were accurate. So those are the types of urban legends that we’re still faced with.
In your book, you write that voter participation rates are high and that widespread fraud is rare. In fact, there were only 475 possible cases of voter fraud in 2020 among millions of voters. Why then do you think 43 states are working to enact stricter voting laws that many say would only disenfranchise voters and decrease access to the polls?
We always say every vote counts, but when you can win by less than a thousand votes in a whole state, then you really need to make sure that you’ve drilled it down. So we want to make sure your voter rolls are accurate. You want to make sure that only American citizens who live in your state are voting in those elections, and you want to make sure that people haven’t moved away, haven’t voted in two states. And that’s why we have all these fail-safes in place. The one area that people have concern is in the absentee ballot process. I said when I ran back in 2018 that we should have a photo ID with that. And I like that Minnesota’s been using it, we’re using it, Texas will be using it. So it’s a red state, blue state–doesn’t matter where you live because it’s an objective criterion.
Now you have to make sure you don’t start going to the point where you’re really closing doors for people’s ability to vote. Like in Georgia, we’ve added an additional day of early voting and voters really like that. And so do your county election directors.
Some people claim that requiring photo IDs can be discriminatory. What’s your reaction to that?
Well, the National Bureau of Economic Research did a study and their peer-reviewed study showed that the photo ID did not decrease turnout in any way. According to poll testing, all demographic groups from both political parties like photo ID. It makes sense. So there are activists on both sides that never like anything but look at the average common person. They think that photo ID makes sense.
Are you worried about these 43 states that are enacting stricter voting laws that the pendulum may be swinging too far? And it may be resulting in some voters being disenfranchised.
I think Georgia struck the right balance. And as for the other, you know, 42 states, I don’t know what they’re up to. I’m the Secretary of State of Georgia, and so I look at what we do in Georgia and I’ll let other states manage their own affairs.
Are you just being political here?
No, I just don’t appreciate when other states stick their nose in our business as they did after November 2020. And so I’m not gonna stick my nose in their business.
When you think about the anniversary of January 6th and the violence that erupted as a result of the election of 2020, what goes through your mind?
It was a horrific day. People died, people were injured. I think it was a shock to the system. I think all of us just, you know, breathe deep, we kind of gasped and we couldn’t believe what we were watching on TV. I think we all realized that that was a bridge too far and I think we all really want to step back and make sure it never happens again.
Are you worried about what some Republican lawmakers are doing to perhaps lay the foundation to discount votes in 2024?
In Georgia, we’re going to make sure that we count every lawful legal vote. We ask just a few simple questions. Do you live in Georgia? Are you over 18? Are you an American citizen? And as long as you hit those three criteria, you can vote in Georgia. We expect a strong, robust election. And a lot of people will be out there voting. We had 4 million people as a record turnout in 2018. Then we had 5 million for the presidential race in 2020. We’re going to have a really strong turnout in 2022. And we’re going to make sure our systems and our people are ready to make sure we manage that election well.
How concerned are you that another January 6th might be in store down the road?
Seeing January 6th just reminded me of when I was a young teenager seeing the newspaper of Kent State 1970 when those four students were killed. I think all of a sudden that was a shock to our system. We had a lot of those antiwar protests that bubbled up in the late sixties and seventies and I think it just calmed everyone down and said, ‘we’re going too far.’ And I think people realize January 6th went too far. I think people are trying to figure out how to move forward.
We need to have respectful conversations. They need to be truthful conversations. I come to my conservative leanings, honestly. Other people come to their leftward leanings honestly, but let’s recognize the humanity in each of us.
I know that you voluntarily testified before the January 6th commission. What are you hoping will come out of that body?
Well, I think there’s already been information released that’s very interesting, and I think there will be more information so that everyone will have a full picture of exactly what was going on behind the scenes. And what happened in Georgia is really an open book. The President and I had a conversation. It’s out there, anyone that wants to listen to it, it’s still out there on the web. A lot of this other information was not really out there. So now it’s seeing the light of day and I think transparency, I think that’s a good thing.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
