Both candidates for Georgia’s foreign ministry defend the right to vote, but differ on what that means

The candidates for Georgia’s foreign minister, Republican Brad Raffensperger and Democrat Bee Nguyen, both claim to be strong defenders of Georgians’ voting rights, despite having wildly different ideas about how to protect the state’s elections.

One of the main tasks of the foreign minister is the conduct of elections. Raffensperger, an engineer by trade, has built a reputation as a national defender of electoral integrity during his first term in office. Nguyen, who founded and ran a non-profit organization before entering politics, has based her campaign on defending the accessibility of elections and the right to vote of Georgians, particularly Georgians of color.

The formerly insignificant role has become a focal point of political infighting in Georgia, where legislative reforms of the state’s electoral laws and challenges to the election results have thrown a national spotlight on the fundamental machinery of the state’s democratic system.

Last year, Raffensperger cemented his reputation as a man of integrity and even as a defender of democracy when he defied then-President Donald Trump’s attempt to persuade him to “find” additional votes to push the 2020 election results in Georgia in Trump’s favour to change.

In a nationally televised testimony, Raffensperger told a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the national capital how he resisted Trump’s pleas during a long — and high-pressure — phone call in early 2021.

“There were no voices to be found,” Raffensperger told the committee in June. “The numbers were the numbers and we couldn’t do the math because we made sure we checked every single allegation.”

Closer to home, Raffensperger defended a long list of electoral politics in Georgia in a 2018 lawsuit filed by voting rights group Fair Fight Action.

This week, a federal district court judge ruled that Georgia is under no obligation to change those policies. Fair Fight Action is likely to appeal the decision. Raffensperger called the ruling a victory and said the lawsuit was politically motivated.

Raffensperger has set himself the goal of cleaning up Georgia’s electoral rolls – sometimes too aggressively, say advocates of voting rights like Nguyen.

Earlier this year, Raffensperger called for a state constitutional amendment that would ban non-citizens from voting, which is already banned under Georgian law. And he examined Georgia’s electoral rolls for non-citizens who had registered and found around 1,600 cases, which he forwarded to other agencies for further investigation.

Raffensperger has also defended the state’s controversial electoral reform bill of 2021 — Senate Bill 202. This law added an ID requirement for mail-in ballot applications, restricted the location of ballot boxes, and prohibited non-poll officials from distributing food and drink near voter lines.

It also drew national criticism, prompting Major League Baseball to move the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in protest.

Raffensperger and other Republican leaders in Georgia have defended the law as essential to protecting Georgia’s elections.

“As Secretary of State, I worked to get SB 202 passed, known as the Election Integrity Act, which will make Georgia one of the nation’s top states for election security,” Raffensperger said this week. “I am the only candidate who has a proven track record of protecting all Georgia voters, regardless of political pressure.”

Like Raffensperger, Nguyen got her start in politics as an Atlanta district representative in the state House of Representatives after winning her seat in a special election in 2017. But Nguyen differs from Raffensperger on what the basic stance of Georgia’s electoral laws should be: She argues that the laws should be pitted in favor of registering people to vote, rather than focusing too much on administrative requirements that could disenfranchise people .

One of her proudest accomplishments as state official was amending an “exact match” voter registration law that helped get 50,000 voters back on the voter rolls, Nguyen said. She also co-sponsored legislation allowing some ex-felons to vote in Georgia.

And she says Raffensperger, despite his national reputation, eroded voting rights in Georgia.

“Here’s the thing about Brad Raffensperger. He wants to present himself to Georgia voters as a person who has taken a stand against Donald Trump,” Nguyen said. “But the reality is following the law is the bare minimum and is expected of every elected official who has taken the oath of office.”

A recent ad series in support of Nguyen, paid for by the state Democratic Party, criticized Raffensperger’s defense of Georgia’s 2021 election law, calling it “one of the most restrictive new election laws in the country.”

The ads, which run in five major Georgian media outlets, also criticize Raffensperger’s stance on abortion, which became a topic of the glowstick campaign after a Georgia law banning most abortions came into force this summer.

“You may think you know Brad Raffensperger, but you don’t know the whole story,” says the ad’s narrator. “Raffensperger wanted to ban abortion at the moment of fertilization.”

As a state deputy, Raffensperger sponsored an unsuccessful 2016 state house resolution proposing a constitutional amendment to “recognize the supreme right to life of all human beings at every stage of development.”

Abortion is irrelevant to the foreign minister’s role, said Jordan Fuchs, a spokeswoman for the Raffensperger campaign.

“Task one is to know what the Secretary of State’s office actually does,” says Fuchs. “It’s clear that Bee [Nguyen] does not understand that this office has nothing to do with this topic.”

Nguyen’s campaign released details of third-quarter campaign fundraising this week. Nguyen raised over $1 million in the past three months. All in all, the campaign has raised a total of $3.2 million and currently has about $1.2 million in cash, according to a press release.

The Raffensperger campaign is expected to release its latest campaign fundraising numbers in the next few days.

Ted Metz, a Libertarian candidate, is also running for the post.

The three candidates will debate Oct. 18 as part of the Atlanta Press Club’s Loudermilk-Young debate series.

This story is available through a news partnership with the Capitol Beat News Service, a Georgia Press Educational Foundation project.