'Integrity Still Matters'

Of all the Republicans to push back on Donald Trump’s baseless claims about voter fraud, Brad Raffensperger, the mild-mannered top election official in Georgia, did not seem like a likely candidate.

It was just a few months ago that civil rights groups called on Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to resign from his position after voters spent hours waiting to vote in the primary election. He also faced criticism for declining to mail an absentee ballot application to all voters for the general election – something he did in the primary. And he raised alarms by creating an election fraud taskforce and trumpeting potential voter fraud prosecutions with little context.

But after Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden by around 13,000 votes, Raffensperger has emerged as one of the few Republican officials across the US who has aggressively disputed Trump’s baseless claims that fraud tainted the election result in the state. Trump, who endorsed Raffensperger in 2018, is now directing his ire at the secretary of state, and Georgia’s two Republican senators, both locked in separate runoff contests against Democrats, have called on Raffensperger to resign.

Raffensperger, who is quarantining after his wife tested positive for Covid-19, continued to push back on the attacks against his office on Wednesday, saying Trump’s loss in the state – long considered a Republican stronghold – was the candidate’s fault.

“I’m a conservative Republican. Yes, I wanted President Trump to win. But as secretary of state we have to do our job,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “I’m gonna walk that fine, straight, line with integrity. I think that integrity still matters.”

He added there were 24,000 Republicans who voted by mail in Georgia’s primary, but did not turn out to vote in November. Those voters didn’t vote again in November, Raffensperger suggested, because Trump railed against voting by mail.

“Voters listened to the president, they didn’t show up,” he said. “That would have been a 10,000 person cushion that President Trump would have had if those folks would have come back out. They just stayed at home.”

“Democrats really strongly pushed it,” he added. “I hope that, as a Republican, our party becomes very active.”

Raffensperger says he has tried to use a fact-based approach to push back on false claims thrown at his state. When Republicans complained about the voting machines in Georgia, the state completed an audit on a random sampling of machines in six counties and found no tampering.

“We keep trying to knock down these rumors. But it’s like whack-a-mole. It’s a rumor mill not supported by fact,” he said.

He noted that the CDC said just before election day that voters with Covid-19 could vote in person, which might have scared off older voters from showing up at the polls.

“It’s really those little things that turned out to be big things. It’s not the machines, and it’s not the process.”

by Sam Levine, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Brynn Anderson/AP