B.Rad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top election official, was sitting at his kitchen counter with his wife Tricia, his cell phone on a metal stand, to take notes in early January. On the flip side was Donald Trump, who lost Georgia to Joe Biden in November, a result that has been confirmed by multiple recounts.
The president made a blunt and unimaginable request to Raffensperger: find enough votes to turn the election result in Georgia around.
Raffensperger, a trained engineer with gentle manners, refused to respond to the president’s request but saw it as a threat, he writes in his new book Integrity Counts.
Since then, he and his family have been subjected to a barrage of harassment, including death threats, from Trump and his supporters. Republicans in the Georgia state legislature have removed him from office as chairman of the state electoral committee. Now he’s running next year in what is likely to be an extremely difficult primary for him in a field that includes at least one Trump-backed candidate attempting to overturn the 2020 election results.
The Guardian spoke to Raffensperger about the January phone call with Trump, threats to election officials, and whether he believes there is a place in the Republican Party today for officials who oppose attempts to undermine the 2020 election results.
Did you talk to Trump since that January call? Do you expect to speak to him ever again?
No, I haven’t spoken to him, and I don’t expect that to happen in the future.
Were you Fear in the moment of [the phone call]? You have the President of the United States, the leader of your party, in a very heated environment in the days after the election that is putting you under pressure do something that could affect whether he serves a different term. And have you ever doubted what you were doing?
I wanted to make sure we all had the facts. That we didn’t miss anything. I kept asking our team: “What about this? So what about it? “And so we investigated every single allegation. Then I sent a letter to Congress, it’s a 10-page letter that I put in the book – you got it on January 6th, and I did knows they were busy with other things, but it really goes through point by point every single accusation that has been made.
I understand that my side is grieving and having difficulty understanding this, but 28,000 people, 28,000 Georgians, did not elect anyone for president. You skipped this and still voted against the vote. And when I give Republicans these three data points, it really dawns on them, they start to understand that it was [tail-off] on top of the ticket.
But people are still talking about the ballots that were stuffed in the suitcase and what else. People don’t seem to be convinced Facts.
I think everyone is best served when they have intellectual honesty. And to have intellectual honesty, one must have intellectual curiosity. That you actually want to uncover the facts and have the courage to actually examine them and maybe change and question your paradigm because what you were told was wrong.
At some point I know that when I’ve been lied to by all of these people and they know they lied to people, I think they get angry and really understand that they were being played.
Are you concerned to see Republicans flirt with these claims and, in some cases, not deny or even embrace them?
Well, let’s be fair and balanced. It bothers me that both parties do that. Because Stacey Abrams was in Virginia less than three weeks ago and said, “Just because you win doesn’t mean you’ve won.” Her tale of voter suppression has been parroted by many people, from Hillary Clinton to many other notable national figures. (Note: Abrams has strongly dismissed attempts by Raffensperger and others to equate their decision not to admit Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race to Trump’s efforts to overturn the elections.)
So actually both sides are to blame for this. And both sides need to pull back, hold on, and walk that line of integrity. If you follow this line of integrity, you can restore trust.
Are you still receiving threats?
Now and then you get a text message or voicemail when the book is out. They are people who really don’t want to know the truth and don’t want to dig into the truth. I understand where they come from. You are not happy to lose an election. They are not happy with the direction of the country and probably not with President Biden. A lot has happened under his leadership in the last year that is very disappointing and alarming.
Are you worried that seasoned election workers will quit their jobs?
I’m concerned we’ve seen in Georgia that likely fewer than a handful of county electoral directors retired a little early.
And that’s why you hate to see that. And you just hope they have a team that will pick up that mantle and lead it with strong leadership.
I wanted to ask you a little about the provisions of Georgia’s new electoral law, which specifically deals with your power on the state’s electoral committee. How concerned are you with efforts to give legislatures in Georgia and elsewhere more control over bodies such as the state electoral committee and the electoral administration?
I have always believed that these bodies should be accountable to the electorate.
If you look around Georgia, the chairman of the state election committee has always been an elected post. For that reason alone, I don’t think it was wise. I think at some point in the future you will regret your decision. But it was made with vengeance, petty retribution, blame in mind to appease people looking for a head on a plate.
So you’re still very much against it?
Well it’s bad policy. I don’t support bad politics.
You are in a competitive primary with at least one opponent who has expressed serious doubts about the integrity of the 2020 elections. How concerned are you that someone might come to power who receives a call from the president or someone else and is willing to go along with what you didn’t want to do in 2020?
I believe that Americans are mostly good, honest people. And they are looking for honest government. And they are looking for people who stand in the gap and do the right thing. And I’ve shown that I’m going to make the tough demands to make sure we obey the constitution, we obey the laws of the countries.
I’m talking to republicans. I talk to a lot of them. And yes, I get insulted by a few dogs. But a lot of Republicans support what I’ve done. They are disappointed with the results. They wish the president had won. That covers the whole gamut. But people realize that when people do the right thing, even when it may seem difficult, it is really something that should be modeled and cherished.
I’m excited to see what message you think it would send if people didn’t vote for it. If what you did in 2020 cost you a choice next year, what message would that send?
Well, people have to decide individually and collectively what our country should look like. And I think the vast majority of Americans, like I said, are good, honest, tax-paying, and law-abiding Americans. And what they want are people who make the right decision.
