Plenty of faces in Georgia have changed since the contentious 2020 elections when former President Donald Trump tried to overturn his loss in Georgia. Some of his staunchest allies, including Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have risen to powerful positions and could have far more influence this year if Trump tries to contest the election again.
Others, such as former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, have been practically drummed out of the GOP for opposing Trump and his attempts to flip Georgia’s results.
But one face has not changed, that of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He is in the same office he occupied four years ago when Trump sought counts and recounts, and ultimately placed an infamous phone call demanding of the secretary of state, “I just need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
This year, Raffensperger says he’s ready if history repeats itself.
“This will be my team’s second presidential election,” he told reporters this week. “We have overseen thousands of elections since 2018, with thousands of elected officials successfully and wonderfully accepting their own wins and,” he added, “tens of thousands gracefully conceding to those who have won.”
One candidate, of course, who never conceded was Trump, nor did his most fervent supporters. Together, they have spent the past four years denying that Joe Biden won the election. They tried to overturn the results, attempted to boot Raffensperger from office in his 2022 GOP primary, and are now seeding the ground with new conspiracies, presumably in an effort to challenge the results in case of another Trump loss here.
“I think it’s pretty obvious that after the 2020 election, some people just couldn’t handle what the results were,” Raffensperger told me at a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution event. “But if you really look at what we did, we went above and beyond the call of duty. … At the end of the day, people who hold office need to follow the law, follow the Constitution, and that’s what we did.”
In the years since 2020, Georgia’s Republican-led Legislature has also passed multiple bills overhauling election law in an effort to shore up GOP voters’ middling confidence after years of Trump calling elections “rigged.”
One new law requires voter ID for absentee voting by mail. Another requires counties to report early and absentee votes an hour after polls close on election night, which officials hope will make it possible to call the presidential race on Tuesday night, if not shortly after. A third measure specifically removed Raffensperger from the State Election Board after years of butting heads with GOP leaders.
But Raffensperger said voter confidence is a focus of his, too. A new data hub on the secretary of state’s website is designed for voters to see where and when ballots are received and counted during elections, almost as it’s happening. And although Raffensperger endorsed Trump in 2016, he won’t endorse anyone for any office this year.
“I will hold both parties accountable to the voters of Georgia, and I stand ready to defend the results of the election,” he said.
Not being a member of either team has left the secretary of state on the outs with partisans on both sides at times. Democrats have chafed at his most conservative positions, including a push for a constitutional amendment to ban immigrants in the country illegally from voting in Georgia elections, even though it’s already illegal. Trump supporters say he’s standing in the way of fair elections. Georgia GOP Chair Josh McKoon said, “I’m not going to say to you that I think he’s a dishonest person, but I think that he’s got a blind spot in terms of taking this position that it’s impossible for anyone in elections administration to make an error.”
It’s true that Raffensperger defends election administrators publicly and frequently, although not as completely as some might want. Georgia law puts each county in charge of running its own elections. Once certified at the county level, it’s up to Raffensperger to certify the state’s election results, as he will again after Georgians finish voting this year.
Until then, his office is focused on identifying security threats against election officials or polling places, preparing for possible post-election lawsuits, and batting down the rampant election misinformation that’s circulating on social media, especially on the far right.
Trump himself has already accused all 50 states of cheating and has posted numerous conspiracies.
“Some of these things are so coo-coo-kachoo crazy town, you just don’t know what to respond to sometimes,” Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office, said this week.
One of the most serious so far popped up Thursday night from Amy Kremer, a pro-Trump Georgia activist who helped in 2021 to organize the “Save America” rally on the Ellipse that preceded the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. She posted a video on X of a man who said he was a Haitian immigrant who had just voted repeatedly in Gwinnett County.
That forced Raffensperger to put out a message calling the video an obvious fake likely put out by Russian trolls. “As Americans we can’t let our enemies use lies to divide us and undermine faith in our institutions — or each other,” he wrote.
Earlier this month, Kremer’s daughter Kylie Jane, who is also a Trump activist, wrote on X that Raffensperger doesn’t just belong in jail, “You belong under the jail, for subverting Georgian’s right to secure, free & fair elections.”
Incredibly, none of this seems to rattle Raffensperger, who has already walked through the fire of 2020 and worse.
“All you can really control at the end of the day is yourself,” Raffensperger said. “And at the end of the day, you’ve got to decide what kind of human being you want to be and what kind of citizen you want to be. I’m going to do my job.”
