AITA: A confused older man called asking me to ‘find more votes’ for him but I refused

Basically, the call went immediately off the rails; indeed, it would be kind of inaccurate to say that it was at any point on the rails? I pick up the phone, we announce that everyone’s on the call, including his friend Mark (who frankly seems like he’s enabling a lot of dubious things right now) and a person he seemed to view as a lawyer (doesn’t necessarily mean anything!), and then he immediately starts shouting that I need to “find” him “votes.”

I should mention that I am the secretary of state of Georgia, and, as such, basically the absolute minimum of my job is to make sure we don’t just randomly pick the winner of elections and give all our electoral votes to them because they call and yell at me, so that was how I was coming in.

Him: [Conspiracy theory I did not perfectly understand, additional different conspiracy theory, just repeating an election worker’s name a bunch of times as though the name itself was proof of wrongdoing, description of an edited video he saw on Fox News maybe? Incoherent shouting about how he has 500,000 votes we should just take as assumed — he does NOT, we checked — but we only need to give him enough votes to win the election, and we need to find them for him.]

Mark: So, we can agree to work together on this, right?

Me: We can agree to work together in the sense that we are happy to get on the phone later and explain that we think everything you’ve just said is incorrect!

Then he started to go on and on about how it was unlikely that anyone could ever move back to Georgia and legitimately vote here again after previously leaving the state? Which, I understand there are things in our electoral process that are pretty wacky, but the concept that somebody might want to move back to a state seems like a very weird one to latch onto as definitely untrue. But he kept going on about it. Literally, he was like: “How many people do that? They moved out, and then they said, ‘Ah, to hell with it, I’ll move back.’ You know, it doesn’t sound like a very normal … you mean, they moved out, and what, they missed it so much that they wanted to move back in? It’s crazy.”

Verbatim quote!! Which, in addition to being very strange, seemed kind of insulting to the lovely state of Georgia! Of course people who leave it for other places could want to move back!

My friend and I tried to say it wasn’t crazy, but he was not really in a listening place.

The call goes on for like an hour, somehow, most of it him yelling at me, and he and Mark kept trying to pressure me to look into this less “litigiously,” which I think meant that he wanted me to just announce I found a bunch of votes for him maybe in a drawer or a ravine somewhere? Really unclear where I was supposed to be getting these votes!

But he was like, I heard people saying there are a lot of fake votes and dead people voting. Okay, you heard that, that’s great, but did you hear it from somewhere true, or did you just read it on the Internet, where people make things up? And then he got offended that I thought he was reading made-up things on the Internet. Like, what am I supposed to do with this?

Anyway, I don’t think I was in the wrong here. I let him talk and talk and talk and tell me about these conspiracy theories he’d heard. I just didn’t agree to find him any votes, since I don’t think he understands how elections work.

I should mention he is the president of the United States. AITA?

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