What you need to know about Brad Raffensperger

But Trump has no choice but to try to create an imperfect enemy if he wants to attack election results in Georgia. It’s a state run entirely by Republicans, and Raffensperger is the Republican in charge of elections there.

Here’s more about the Republican standing in the way of Trump’s remarkable attempt to change the will of voters in one of the most important states of the 2020 presidential election.

In a phone call on Jan. 2, President Trump insisted he won the state and threatened vague legal consequences. Here are excerpts from the call. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

Raffensperger drew national attention as a candidate for secretary of state during the 2018 Georgia governor’s race. The then-secretary of state, Republican Brian Kemp, was running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams. She narrowly lost and accused Kemp of using his role as secretary of state to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

Raffensperger was running that year to take Kemp’s place as the top election official. He was and has been supportive of Kemp’s questionable maneuvers to purge voter rolls (which require people to re-register to vote) and of strict voter ID laws. As The Fix’s Aaron Blake recaps, in 2019 Raffensperger purged about 4 percent of Georgia voters from voter registration, a move critics labeled undemocratic. He was also critical of absentee voting before the pandemic; like many Republicans, he argued it opened the door to fraud.

His next high-profile moment in the job came in June, during Georgia’s presidential primaries. These were among the first major primaries of the pandemic, and they didn’t go well. There were hours-long lines, particularly in Democratic-leaning communities in and around Atlanta, and poll workers struggled to handle new voting machines. Voting rights advocates said Georgia election officials didn’t prepare enough for the increase in mail balloting. Abrams directly blamed Raffensperger for “inaction, poor planning and horrific execution.” Raffensperger said much of the trouble was the fault of Democratic county officials.

Before running as secretary of state, Raffensperger was a city council member outside Atlanta, and he’s a multimillionaire businessman and an engineer by training.

He’s a Trump supporter. Or at least he was before all of this. Trump endorsed him in his secretary of state race. Raffensperger said he voted for the president and was rooting for him to win Georgia.

In the week after the election, Georgia was still counting votes, and pressure by Trump and his allies was just ramping up on the secretary of state. Here’s what Raffensperger told The Washington Post’s Reis Thebault and Amy Gardner at the time: “If people want to understand what I’m doing, I’m just doing what the law says. We’re just going to do that. Do I hope that President Trump wins? Yeah, I certainly do. I’m a Republican. But I can’t put my thumb on the scale of the process.”

Raffensperger hasn’t denounced Trump or the Republican Party. But the more Trump escalates pressure on him, the sharper Raffensperger’s criticism of the president’s efforts has become.

There’s no love lost between him and the two Republican senators from Georgia. Once allies, Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler were some of the first Georgia Republicans to turn on Raffensperger after it became clear Trump had lost the state.

They called on Raffensperger to resign but offered no actual evidence for why. Raffensperger’s response was biting: “If I was Senator Perdue, I’d be irritated I was in a runoff.” The drama has some Republican strategists worried that the party is least unified when it most needs to be to win Tuesday’s runoffs in two races that will determine which party controls the Senate.

He’s outing Republicans who have tried to pressure him to change results. In November, Raffensperger told The Post’s Gardner that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) called him and asked if he could toss thousands of mailed ballots based on baseless concerns about whether election workers properly confirmed voters’ signatures. Graham denied explicitly asking Raffensperger to throw out legal ballots, but Raffensperger was insistent: “It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.

He and his family have received death threats: “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.” That’s one text he shared with The Post. His office has said his wife received threats they characterized as “sexualized.” Someone broke into one of his adult children’s homes.

As he presided over the election, then three counts confirming former vice president Joe Biden’s narrow win in the state, Raffensperger accepted a security detail.

He’s also defended election workers in his state, saying they are driven to accurately count results and are not part of some deep-state conspiracy to swing the election for Biden.

He’s become one of the most forceful voices against Trump and his Republican allies’ attempts to overturn the election. Raffensperger has pushed back against broad accusations that the election he presided over was somehow fraudulent.

But he’s also used his authority as secretary of state to directly confront conspiracy theories about voting machines having been manipulated or ballots cast by mail having been improperly approved. He’s presided over three recounts — one by hand, which is the most secure way to confirm that machines and people counted ballots properly. And he acquiesced to one of Trump’s demands to review signatures on the outside of voters’ envelopes to confirm they match the signature the state had on file for that voter. Each time, they found no evidence of widespread fraud — as he told the president in that phone call.

“President Trump,” he said in that call Saturday, “we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. We don’t agree that you have won.”

“This is what it looks like when your party is losing: scapegoating, finger-pointing,” he told The Post in a December emailed statement.

In December, he gave the green light for a top GOP election official who reports to him to hold a news conference and directly address Trump and tell him to stop leading people to believe Georgia’s election was fraudulent: “Someone’s going to get hurt,” said an angry Gabriel Sterling, who manages voting systems for Raffensperger. “Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed.”

Raffensperger on Monday said of the leaked call that Trump first betrayed confidence about the conversation. “It was a private conversation as far as I was concerned,” Raffensperger told an Atlanta reporter in an interview. “He broke privacy when he put out a tweet, but then his tweet was false.”

On Monday, Sterling and Raffensperger held a news conference where they specifically rebutted election fraud claims, including one the president vaguely made in that call: “This is all easily provably false,” Sterling said, “and yet the president persists.”

Source: WP