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Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger accuses both sides of tolerating a climate of violence that has led to death threats against election officials and against himself and his family, he said on Monday in a statement. visit to Statesboro.
Reuters, followed by CNN, reported on Friday that Raffenspergers’ wife received a series of anonymous text messages in April threatening the lives of the couple and their family. As a guest speaker for a United Statesboro Rotary Club meeting on Monday, he was interviewed by the Statesboro Herald before addressing the club. One question was who is to blame for the political atmosphere in which such threats occur?
On both sides, because last year we witnessed a lot of riots and other destructive behavior, violence when towns were invaded and it came from violent radical left-wing elements, and that no one in the leftist political establishment has condemned it, Raffensperger mentioned. Likewise when it happens on the right, it then forces us to condemn the violence that comes from the extreme limit of our camp.
The threats reported against Georgian election workers in 2020 and early 2021 were not limited to state officials. Local election directors have been threatened and subjected to verbal abuse in some red and blue majority counties, he said.
We have to condemn violence on both sides, but it won’t work if I don’t clean up my own backyard first, Raffensperger said, and so if we on the right don’t clean up our backyard, how can we we expect to have the moral authority to challenge what is happening on the left?
Recent history
Threats of violence against Georgian election officials became national news fall and last winter as then-President Donald Trump repeatedly claimed he won in the state despite the fact that current President Joe Biden won here by a margin of less than 12,000 votes.
Earlier in 2020, Georgia rolled out new touchscreen voting equipment that produces paper prints of every voter ‘s choices. This allowed for a sort of recount that would not have been possible with the previous equipment, and Raffensperger in November ordered a state-wide manual audit of all printed and absent ballots marked at. the hand. The results confirmed Biden’s victory, as did a second recount requested by Trump and to which he was entitled under Georgian law because the margin was less than 0.5%.
Raffensperger publicly affirmed the integrity of the Georgia election every step of the way and testified before Congress that there was no evidence of significant fraud or other issues that could change the outcome.
Trump had notoriously called Raffensperger to ask for more votes and ridiculed Governor Brian Kemp, another Republican, for failing to overturn the election result.
Then, on January 5, a runoff made two Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, two US senators from Georgia, toppling two Republicans and giving Democrats tight control of the Senate. The next day, a crowd of Trump supporters left a rally where he spoke and stormed the U.S. Capitol as members of Congress attempted to certify the result of the presidential election state by state.
Confidence of voters
While still defending election results in Georgia, Raffensperger also defends most of the changes to state election laws passed this year with Senate Bill 202, necessary to restore voter confidence.
When asked why it wasn’t a contradiction, he started talking about which parts of the new law he prefers.
First, the law now requires an identity card, such as a driver’s license or free state-issued voter card or approved replacement document, to obtain a postal ballot. Previously, postal ballot requests only required a registered voter address and signature, which election officials attempted to match to a registered signature.
When he ran for Secretary of State in 2018, Raffensperger was already saying Georgia needs to move away from signature matching for mail ballots with driver’s license numbers as a form of objective identification, he recalled.
This is what the General Assembly ultimately did with SB 202, he said. My personal feeling is this is the best part of the whole bill as it removes the subjective nature of the signatures and switches to the objective nature of the photo ID with your driver’s license number and then your date of birth.
Noting that postal ballots were much maligned but also used by record numbers of voters last year, he said the identification requirement is an attempt to address concern and improve confidence in postal ballots; and the safety and security of the process.
The second of Raffensperger’s favorite parts of the new law is the addition of extra days for in-person early voting. Previously, Georgia required local election officials to allow 16 days of early voting, including a Saturday, in most elections. Some counties also added the Sunday vote. The new law adds a mandatory second Saturday, increasing the required early voting days to 5 pm, and allows two optional Sundays to be voted by county-level decision.
So we have up to 19 days, which puts us at the top of the comparison charts with every other state in the country, he said.
But the law shortens the time between an initial election and any second round to four weeks, so that a nine-week campaign season, like the one that occurred between November 3 and January 5, does not happen again. more. Raffensperger also expressed his support for this change.
The new law also shortens the window of opportunity to request a postal vote from 180 days to 78 days before an election.
President of the electoral commission
One provision he wishes had been left out is the impeachment of the Secretary of State’s new laws as chairman of the State Elections Council. In fact, he was removed from his position as a voting member, after Georgias’ elected state secretaries have led the board for the past 50 years. From now on, the president will be a person appointed by the governor and ratified by the legislature, and who has not made campaign donations to any candidate in recent years.
Almost like the Mythical Unicorn, he’s a non-partisan, bipartisan person, Raffensperger said, but I think that’s a tremendous amount of power to have in someone who isn’t elected.
He told the Rotary Club that the law in general should improve voter confidence and that voters are wondering if their votes count is not new in 2020.
The reason I know this is because in 2016, when President Trump won the election, the other side said there was Russian collusion, Raffensperger said. Then you look at 2018 when Governor Kemp won over 50,000 votes here in Georgia, (Democratic candidate) Stacey Abrams didn’t concede; she said it’s due to the suppression of voters. Next, we look at what happened in 2020.
Pat Jones honored
Earlier Monday, at a regional county electoral directors meeting in Springfield, Raffensperger presented an outstanding Georgia citizen certificate to Bulloch County Election Supervisor Patricia Lanier Jones. After 36 years of election work, including the past 11+ years as the county’s first appointed election supervisor, Jones resigned effective June 30, but will continue as a county employee in a new role.
So we wanted to recognize his efforts, but also his entire team and county election staff, Raffensperger said here. After what everyone had to go through last year, we owe them a debt of gratitude.
Raffensperger has not spoken about his candidacy for the Rotary Club, but he is running for re-election in 2022 and already has a few challengers announced.
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