Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, earned widespread praise for his staunch defense of the election results in his state last year in the face of growing threats and pressure from former President Donald J. Trump.
As Mr. Trump spread falsehoods about the election, Mr. Raffensperger vocally debunked them, culminating in a 10-page letter addressed to Congress on Jan. 6, the day of the Capitol riot, in which he refuted, point by point, Mr. Trump’s false claims about election fraud in Georgia.
But after a Georgia judge ruled late last week that a group of voters must be allowed to view copies of all 147,000 absentee ballots cast in the state’s largest county, in yet another disinformation-driven campaign, Mr. Raffensperger voiced his support for the effort, saying that inspecting the ballots would provide “another layer of transparency and citizen engagement.”
As Mr. Trump’s election falsehoods continue to hold sway over many lawmakers and voters, with efforts to review ballots still underway in states across the country, we spoke with Mr. Raffensperger about why he supported the new review ordered by the judge and how he thinks about public trust, or mistrust, in the electoral process. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed….
Raffensperger explained his support for the recount in a long interview with the New York Times. Showing as much “transparency” as possible, he said, will help restore “voter confidence” in the 2020 outcome.
But this perfectly captures the core problem. It presumes that those claiming the election was stolen from Trump can be reasoned into accepting his 2020 loss via more transparency and a continuing appeal to facts.
This misses the whole point of such efforts, which is to manufacture ways to cast doubt on electoral outcomes in conscious and deliberate defiance of what full transparency and the facts reveal. We need to forthrightly confront whether a broader movement is developing, in which such moves are really dry runs at manufacturing fake justifications for subverting future electoral losses by any means necessary.