On Tuesday night, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger became the first official in the state to say that former President Donald Trump would win Georgia, even with more than 500,000 votes still left to count.
“If you look at who is leading, Donald J. Trump has an insurmountable lead, with the number of votes outstanding,” he said, adding, “It looks like this is done.”
For any other Republican official, declaring Trump the winner before all the votes were counted might have seemed like a partisan move to throw the race to the former president. But of all people in Georgia, Raffensperger may be the man with the least incentive to see Trump back in the White House.
Over the past four years, Trump and his allies have called Raffensperger a disgrace and suggested he should be jailed. The president-elect infamously called Raffensperger after his 2020 loss and demanded he “find” the votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory here. Bent on revenge after Raffensperger refused, Trump handpicked a primary challenger to run against the secretary of state in 2022, whom Raffensperger promptly defeated by nearly 20 points.
But even with those clashes behind him, the night of Trump’s victory seemed like just another day at the office for Raffensperger.
“I did my job,” he said Tuesday night after the polls closed. “I followed the law. I followed the Constitution. I’m going to continue to do that because I work for the people of Georgia.”
Unlike years past, the job of secretary of state now requires balancing security and foreign intelligence reports along with overseeing ballot totals and voting machines — on top of the other responsibilities of the office.
On Election Day, all of that and more was in front of Raffensperger, as 1 million-plus voters were expected to cast ballots and a revamped process for reporting early votes would be tested for the first time.
The day started early for Raffensperger, about 5 a.m., before he headed into the state’s election headquarters, a “war room” of sorts where he and more than 50 employees of various federal and state agencies monitor precincts, troubleshoot problems and communicate with county officials across the state on election days.
After the polls opened at 7 a.m. in Georgia, the earliest and biggest problem of the day was a serious one — multiple bomb threats sent to county election officials in mostly Democratic counties.
State and federal officials quickly determined that the threats were hoaxes, likely originating from Russia, which Raffensperger announced at a morning news conference. But even without a physical threat, the damage had been done when several locations evacuated to make sure no threat existed.
“Do we know how many precincts are affected?” Raffensperger asked his senior staff later as they huddled around a conference table. “Let’s find out.’
When the FBI eventually released a statement that afternoon confirming that the threats had likely been Russian hoaxes, Raffenpeger called it “a day late and a dollar short.”
The goal of the bad actors, he said, was “anything that people can do to destabilize, to add doubt, add fear and get people spun up with conspiracy theories.” The result could be delayed results, which he didn’t want.
Along with dealing with the threats, Raffensperger and his team monitored average check-in times (45 seconds) and wait times (less than a minute) for voters, held regular news conferences, and waited for results to come in.
At one point, former GOP U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin came in to tour the war room. “These folks are on top of what’s going on in every county,” Chambliss said after his tour.
For all of the moving parts, Raffensperger’s mood throughout the day was very keep-calm-and-carry-on.
“I don’t feel pressure,” he said with a smile. “But this is a results-oriented business.”
Election days, ironically, can be dead quiet until results come in. During one lull, he recommended a favorite TED talk, told a G-rated rabbit joke and recited favorite quotes. “It doesn’t take a lot of people to change the world for the better.”
But tensions grew as afternoon turned to evening. More bomb threats, all hoaxes, were received by election officials, which delayed poll closures in the state’s largest counties. The crowd of reporters grew as the day went on.
After polls finally closed at 7 p.m., a plan for most of the state’s early voting results to be known an hour after closing missed its mark as some counties ran into trouble. When a server went down in Bibb County, a state helicopter was dispatched from Atlanta with a new one to count the votes.
But by 10:30, as Trump’s margins grew, Raffensperger not only predicted Trump the winner, he declared the day a success. The state had recorded its highest-ever election turnout. Lines remained short. Even the Russian hoaxes didn’t keep the state from tallying the results by the end of the night as promised.
Raffensperger has one more statewide election cycle to oversee — the 2026 contest when he will either have decided to retire from public office or run for another one. With plenty of his own cash and a record of bipartisan wins, he is one wild card candidate other Republicans say they worry about facing in a primary contest.
He hasn’t publicly said what he’ll do next, but he sounded more like a potential candidate than a bureaucrat ready to call it quits as the night wound down Tuesday.
“I stand here today ready to defend every legal vote, regardless of the results, just as I did in 2020, 2022 and now,” he said. “And that is real integrity.”
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