Brad Raffensperger is all too familiar with efforts to undermine American democracy.
Georgia’s Foreign Minister is the one who has suffered the scandal Donald Trump phone call later Election 2020when the then-president urged his fellow Republican “find” 11,780 votes He needed to win the state. Raffensperger refused and death threats followed.
Nearly four years after the unrest that followed the last presidential election, Raffensperger is once again in the crosshairs of Trump loyalists as he battles a pro-Maga majority on the swing state’s election board, which passed last-minute laws that critics say will pave the way for post-election legal chaos, if not violent unrest.
“There are a lot of bad guys out there,” Raffensperger admitted as he visited a polling station in DeKalb County this week for a “security health check,” a live test of one of the large-screen voting machines that will be used across Georgia in the coming weeks. November 5 election. “That’s why we need people who will persevere no matter what.”
If the most vocal Republican election deniers are right, Raffensperger will have a lot to protest.
He and others in the state are fighting to stop “bad actors” from disrupting Georgia’s voting system, both through public education about voting systems and implementing security measures, including panic buttons for poll workers and training on how to use antidotes.
At the same time, county officials “are trying to lay the groundwork to contest the election results in Georgia if former President Trump loses,” said Nikhel Sus, deputy general counsel at the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew).
Their goal, he added, is to use the fraud allegations as an “excuse” for election deniers, who will then refuse to ratify the results from Georgia on January 6, 2025, in what is “really history repeating itself.”
Trump has foretold such an outcome. “We have to make sure that we stop [Democrats] from fraud,” he said at a rally in Atlanta in August. He later praised three of the five members of the state election board as “Pit Bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”
The trio, appointed by Republicans, pushed a last-minute change in law that would allow local election officials to halt the certification of election results to conduct a “reasonable investigation,” without defining what constitutes reasonable.
On Friday, the board issued a rule requiring all ballots in Georgia to be counted by hand — a move that advocates warned was illegal and unworkable, and could delay election results for weeks. Raffensperger accused the board of creating “last-minute chaos,” but he has no power to overturn their decision.
A report published by Crew last month found that at least eight Georgia election officials have refused to certify election results since 2020, the most of any swing state since the previous cycle. All of them have remained in place.
With less than 50 days until the election, and Trump and Kamala Harris neck and neck in the polls in Georgia, Raffensperger has embarked on a tour of more than two dozen counties to reassure the 5 million voters expected to show up in the state that their ballots are safe.
Along with technicians working in his office, he meticulously demonstrated how the Dominion Voting Systems equipment used in Georgia — the very target of conspiracy theories — is protected from hackers and illegal interference, and how ballots are counted and digitally cross-referenced.
“There is a process that has been put in place and it has worked well in the past,” the 69-year-old former engineer said, in his soft Southern accent. He stressed that local election officials do not have the authority to decide to stop certification. “When you come next Monday, state law says you have to do that, the counties will certify the election… that’s right under the black box.”
Along with others, Harris’ campaign is challenging the state election board’s new rules in court, with a trial set to begin next month.
Pro-democracy activists have expressed confidence in the legal system to thwart attempts to delay the results. Efforts to undermine the vote “will ultimately fail because of the robust safeguards in place and because journalists, democracy advocates and voters are closely watching,” said Justin Berger, a Georgia attorney with the advocacy group Informing Democracy.
Crew said any election official who refuses to certify the election results could be sued “immediately” by well-prepared lawyers.
But Berger warned of a troubling “tactical shift” in the run-up to the 2024 vote. “It’s not so much an all-out attack as it is guerrilla warfare, because [the election deniers] win if they just create instability… all it takes is some instability to be created [in 2020] and we had January 6,” he said of the 2021 attack on Capitol Hill.
While Georgia has more election deniers in key positions than elsewhere, they are making inroads in other swing states, including Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Marc Elias, an attorney who successfully fought more than 60 lawsuits filed by election deniers after the 2020 vote and now works for Harris’ campaign, warned that Republicans are “building an election sabotage war machine” and are “much more organized” than they were four years ago.
In addition to placing election deniers in key election administration positions, groups pushing conspiracy theories after the 2020 vote attempted to disqualify tens of thousands of voters in key states, in so-called mass voter challenges, claiming voter rolls were filled with dead people, illegal immigrants or Americans who had moved to other states.
Even as such efforts have largely failed, there are growing concerns about voter intimidation and poll workers being targeted.
ONE recent poll found that nearly 30 percent of Republicans with a favorable view of Trump want armed citizens to serve as poll monitors.
In Georgia, where two poll workers were fired from their homes and jobs after being accused of fraud by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani after the most recent election, Raffensperger’s office has been handing out panic button neckbands to individuals working at polling stations across the state.
Election supervisors have also been trained to use Narcan, an antidote for opioid poisoning, after letters laced with fentanyl were sent to the Fulton County Board of Elections office.
In an effort to boost confidence in the voting process, Georgia has partnered with the “Vet the Vote” campaign, which encourages veterans to become poll workers, in hopes they will gain the trust of voters across the political spectrum.
But Raffensperger is under no illusions that such measures will convince those who believe in the conspiracy theories peddled by members of his own party.
“Some people can’t believe their candidate didn’t make it,” he said. “I’ve been very clear that no matter how you look at it, there was a race in 2020, and 227 Republicans won more votes in all of their districts than President Trump did. And in Georgia, we saw the same thing… People just left the top of the ballot blank.”
Despite being repeatedly criticized by Trump, who said at a rally in Atlanta that Raffensperger was “doing everything he can to make it harder for Republicans to win in 2024,” the secretary of state still has higher approval ratings in Georgia than the former president.
“Everybody knows that no matter what, I’m going to do my job,” Raffensperger said, even as he lamented that “his microphone isn’t loud enough” to drown out voices seeking to sow doubt about the integrity of Georgia’s election.
Asked what would happen if a large number of counties refused to certify the vote in November, Raffensperger smiled ruefully. “The judges will be busy then.”
