The Dispatch Podcast - Politics is a Complicated Profession

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

After Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling asked GOP lawmakers to tone down the unsubstantiated claims of vote fraud in his state earlier this week, the Trump campaign shared a 90-second video on Twitter alleging another Georgia related election conspiracy theory. “Video footage from Georgia shows suitcases filled with ballots pulled from under a table AFTER supervisors told poll workers to leave room and 4 people stayed behind to keep counting votes,” the tweet said. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and other GOP figures have since demanded a signature audit of the presidential election in the Peach State. Where do we go from here? Sterling joined Sarah and Steve on today’s episode to debunk election conspiracy theories about his state and offer a pathway forward for the GOP. “To me, this is the playbook that was run by Stacey Abrams in 2018 in Georgia,” Sterling tells Steve and Sarah of the Trump campaign’s claim that the election was rigged. Show Notes: -90 second clip of Georgia election conspiracy theory shared by the campaign on Thursday and Lin Wood’s rally on Wednesday excoriating Gabriel Sterling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another episode of our special Friday Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined by Steve Hayes. This podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. Check us out at the dispatch. Check out at the dispatch. Check out our newsletters. We've got other podcasts. We think you'll like it. Today, joining us at Gabriel Sterling. He is the voting system implementation manager at the Georgia Secretary of State's office. Yep, he's the guy with all the election problems down in Georgia. On Tuesday, he gave a fiery and at times emotional press conference warning the president that someone was going to get hurt if he did not tone down his rhetoric.

That press conference has now been watched by more than 6 million people and we wanted to talk to Gabe about what is happening down in Georgia. It had all gone too far. All of it. Joe DeGeneva today asked for Chris Krebs, a patriot who ran Sissa, to be shot. A 20-something tech in Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out saying he should be hung for treason because he was transferring a report on batches from an EMS. to a county computer so we could read it it has to stop mr. president you have not condemned these actions or this language senators you have not

condemned this language or these actions this has to stop we need you to step up and if you're going to take a position of leadership show some let's dive right in, Gabriel Sterling joining us. So last night, Governor Kemp on Laura Ingram's show said, I called early on for a signature audit. Obviously, the Secretary of State, per the laws of the Constitution, would have to order that. He has not done that. I think it should be done, especially after what we saw today. There needs to be transparency on that. Hopefully in the next 24 hours, we'll see a lot more. I want you to discuss the video that he's talking about. You've tweeted out a fact check of it.

And then if you could touch on a signature audit and what are the reasons to not do it? Well, let's start with the video. What you see in the video is essentially a 90-second snippet of things have been going on for hours at State Farm Arena, where Fulton County had chosen to do their absentee ballot processing. So there's two things going on in the beginning of this thing. There's two sets of workers in the room. There's one set called cutters. And the cutters of the folks are sitting there putting the envelopes through, opening them up, laying the ballots flat, getting ready to be processed.

And another part of the same room, there's people who are doing scanning. It's like four or five of them going, they're putting stuff through the big centralized scanners. And to put this in perspective, the media is there, there are monitors and the Republican and Democrat Party's there. And they, it's about 10, 15, 10, 10, 20. So they've been there for a long time already. All the ballots have been brought in. So about that time, the cutters are done with their work. So their supervisors are like, okay, we're done, every pack up.

And everybody, including the people who are doing the scanning, it's like, oh, fantastic, we've been here all day, we're ready to go home. So they start putting things away. The cutters start getting their stuff ready to go. The media's like, oh, I guess we're done. They start packing up. And then the monitors, this is where you get to a he said, she said thing. The monitors on the Republican side are saying they were told to leave.

The Fulton County employees said, no, we just said we were leaving, and no one told them they had to go. But it's kind of like everybody started milling around. We've all been in these kind of rooms before. There's some long-term event going on. It was like, oh, let's grab our stuff, get ready to go. And in the meantime, the people who were doing the scanning are packing everything away. Now, around this time, our office, we were at our war room. We heard Fulton County shutting down for the night.

What the heck do you mean they're shutting down for the night? So our elections director, Chris Harvey, calls their electionist director Rick Barron. It says, we hear you're shutting down. He's like, what do you mean we're shutting down? Because Rick Barron is at the English Avenue warehouse, which is where they're doing the election day stuff. So you can see on the videotape, there's a guy named Ralph Jones, who is the absentee manager. He does absentee in voter registration. So Chris calls Rick.

Rick calls Ralph. You see Ralph on the phone pacing around, and then finally was like, hey, no, y'all, we got to get back to work. But around that time was when everybody had already started to leave. I don't know if they were left yet because I've only seen one angle of its video, but our post-certified law enforcement investigators have watched this video at its entirety, much to their own delight, I'm sure, hours of it to make sure what's got going on. So they pull out the boxes they had just put away, and they're saying these are suitcases of ballots. Yeah, the carrying cases used in dozens of counties to haul around ballots,

so you don't have to be carrying boxes. They have wheels on them. This is to try to make this into something weird, you really have to stretch, but we've seen there's no problem with people stretching on some of these things. So there's an 82-minute timeline where they're right. There is no investigator there. There is no partisan monitor there. And we had, because of Fulton County screw-ups in the June election, the state election board had a monitor placed there. And he was at English Avenue, too.

So when I found out that the monitors left, we got him called up. He got there. And then about 20 minutes later, our post-certified law enforcement deputy chief investigator showed up with a gun on his side with a badge. And you know what the workers kept on doing? The exact same thing they had been doing for the previous 82 minutes. They had been doing for the previous three hours. They were just processing ballots. In fact, I talked to the deputy chief.

He's like, they paid me no mind. You'd think they were doing something. They'd be like, oh, crap, stop what you're doing. They're here. So it's just, it's just, it's just, crazy. And so it's frustrating because you see these things. And it's, as I said before, it's like playing whack-a-mole. Every time we get one and we knock it down, we've got another one down. So, and on the signatures, Governor Kemp is in an unenviable position of trying to, you

know, please the base with Trump. And it seems like, it seems like it's such a simple thing. Let's just do a signature audit. But we do have laws and process what we have to do. The only way we can, once the registrar says, this is a valid. ballot. They separate the signature envelope from the secrecy envelope with a ballot in it, because under the Georgia Constitution, we have a secret ballot. So they're separated. So there's no way to tie those back together anymore. So that's out of the way, because the original ask was, let's throw out the illegal ballots where the signatures really didn't match and it wasn't really the person. So that's not possible. So then turned into, well, let's look for

places where there's anomalies and there should have been more signatures that were thrown out, because what they've been going to is they're saying, in the past, it's been two or three percent of it thrown out was only 0.15%. That's an apples and oranges comparison because the two to three percent is all absentee ballots. And the vast majority of those are thrown out because they get here after election day or after the 7 p.m. on election day. So the reality is in 2016, the rejection rate was 0.26%. And the rejection rate in 2018 was 0.16%. And these were much lower numbers of absentee ballots, obviously. And the rejection rate in 2020 was 0.15%. But the difference between the previous two election cycles, and this one is a cure period have been introduced.

So if you're missing a signature, if their signature doesn't match, those things have to be cured by the voter coming in, showing their ID going, yes, this is who I say I am. And we saw a lot of that this time in the thousands. So there was a higher percentage on the front in that we're being rejected. And we brought in extra new trainers from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to train our county-level workers, you know, how do you do this? But one of the things we've been asking for, and I think now we will probably get it, is this is a completely subjective process at the end of the day.

And what we want to do is go to a binary kind of identification process. So like we launched an absentee ballot portal where you have to use your driver's license number, which is a unique pin that people have because I don't even know my driver's license number unless I look at it. So we do that for the portal. We're trying to find a way to use that and other unique identifiers that are binary, that there is no judgment call, there is no subjectivity, so we have less of this kind of questioning after the fact. We will do these signature audits on counties where we have specific allegations

that like this clerk did something wrong. This process wasn't run properly. We will be doing some of those because we're in our law enforcement capacity at this point, which is very different from the election administration capacity because we don't have custody of these documents anymore. We can't just go, hey, superior court judges, who are the ones who hold these now? Give us all that stuff. There are laws around how you do these things. What's the, can I ask just a big picture question based on my own ignorance. A hand recount has already taken place. Why would one do a signature audit after a hand recount? Well, I believe the stated intention by some is to instill confidence in the election system. And what's the difference between the two? Can I, can I get you to go even more

basic for me? What's the difference between a signature audit and a hand recount? The signature audit, what you'd have to do is you have to go get the actual absentee ballot envelopes, which we do hold for two years in case there is a law enforcement issue we have to do. And you would go through and have another, originally the sworn people from the county registrar's office have already said, I have looked at this and it's correct. Now what they want to do is have another person. We don't know who we've had discussions if we were going to go down this route, potentially bringing the GBI in the ones who trained our people to do this to look at them and have them say, this one was probably a little iffier than

the other one. But that's only step one. What you're trying to do is make sure that ballot is attached to that person. And that's why you reach back out to them if it is off. So let's say another party who's better at it says, this really isn't a match. You then still follow up to find out with that voter, was this you who did this? I mean, there's a lot of work involved in that. And if it was done in a mass way, what you would have seen is hundreds or thousands of people going to the polls saying to vote. And it's like, no, no, you've already voted. We didn't see that. I mean, there's, you have to apply common sense to the, to the logic train that goes on these. But as we've seen, the whole point right now is to throw everything you can against the wall to question the

outcome. And this is, to me, this is the playbook that was run by Stacey Abrams in 2018 in Georgia. Make every single claim you can, put it in a court document. At that point, whether you win the court or not, you can say, this is in a filing in court, which gives it the sense of, there's some heft to this claim, because it's in a court filing and somebody swore something. So it's the exact same playbook that Stacey Abrams set up in the Trump campaign that's following that same one. I mean, it's bizarre. I mean, when I was talking to our general counsel here, he says it's really eerily similar, the feeling, the tactics, the statements. Stacey Abrams and Donald Trump are the two sides of the same coin, I've said, on the same front, which is just bizarre.

But when the left questions the outcome of election and undermines the democratic process, when the right questions the outcome of election this way, it undermines the democratic process, they're both undermining the democratic process and the underpinnings of the republic, because if we get to a point where people don't believe the outcome of an election, a friend of mine who is sort of left leaning, he loves the quote, and I don't know who to give it to. It was like, the reason we have ballots is that we can avoid bullets. So if you start undermining and undercutting that institutional belief and trust, then that's where you get to rioting and other bigger societal problems. How long have you been a Republican?

Let's see. I could start to read and write when I was like three. All right. You're a long-term Republican. You're not some Johnny come lately to the party. Right. My first campaign, if you want to be specific about it, was I was 15 years old in 1986 was the re-election campaign of Senator Mack Manningly. So my first campaign ended in failure. But I didn't run away. Most of mine ended in failure, the vast majority. You've got the President of the United States, a member of your party, undermining this election that you ran. Yes.

You've got the governor sort of shrugging his shoulders and putting it on the Secretary of State to avoid criticism from the President. You've got the two Senate candidates calling on the Secretary of State to resign. and saying that the thing was rigged or mismanaged? Are you disappointed to be a Republican? Are you disappointed in your party? I'm never going to be disappointed to uphold the values that I consider strong in my gut and in my heart. And I'm going to fight for the sanity and sanctity of my party.

I'm not going to run away from it. I'm disappointed in the individuals there. And I specifically said, and I'm still, you know, January 5th, the balance of the Senate's in play. We cannot give, from my point of view, the liberal party, the ability to do all the stuff they say they want to do. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to say, we don't want to have to negotiate.

So we've got to win Georgia. I'm like, that's terrifying to me. But the balance of the Senate is in play with two candidates who say that you should all be fired because you rigged an election. Oh, listen. You're not, they didn't go that far. The president did. They just said we weren't transparent,

which the funniest part about that to me, if anybody knows what's happening here, we're doing two press conferences a day. and at that time, we were doing, like, hourly press releases on the count. I mean, I don't know how much more transparent we could have been unless we walked out with no clothes on. I mean, we were being so transparent, it was ridiculous. But you know what happened?

President Trump went to them and said, I know this because their staffs were surprised when this happened. They didn't know it was coming. President Trump with the two of them and said, you're going to ask for the resignation so we can build up this case. Otherwise, I'm going to do two tweets and torpedo your campaigns. I mean, that's what happened. It may not be those exact words.

in that exact time frame. But that's what happened. And they feel like they have to keep the Trump base ginned up. And I used to run campaigns. And you try to be honorable for these things, but there's not somebody asked me today, how do you feel about this? Because I am going to still vote for them. I said, I'm a big fan of the Mandalorian. And I was really, you know, reminded of Warner Herzog's statement to the Mandalorian in the first couple of episodes, bounty hunting it's a complicated profession. Politics is a complicated profession. So, you know, it's that kind of thing you have to deal with. And I've disappointed. My gut tells me with the reactions that I've gotten that if Senators Leflare and Purdue stood up and said, you know what, we've now looked at the

evidence. This was a well-run election. We need to focus on January 5th in the future of the party in the country. They would get more votes than they would lose. Maybe I'm wrong. I could be. I mean, I've been out of that game for a little while, but it's never the wrong time to do the right thing, and I think people would be pleased and surprised and happy, and there would be like a weight off some people's shoulders on that, honestly. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change, and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of

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Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. You have to imagine as the conspiracies to further these suggestions that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, can't be helping Republicans at this point. And look, I mean, you know, you saw this when Ron and Romney McDaniel, chairman of the Republican Party nationally, went down to Georgia, has an event. And she faces some intense questioning from Georgia Republicans who say, in effect, you're telling me that all these elections are rigged. You're telling me that this one specifically in Georgia was rigged less than a month ago. And you're also telling me I need to go out and vote in the next

one. Why would I do that if it's all rigged? And she couldn't answer the questions, which I thought was sort of an important woman. It was. I mean, it was bizarre. I mean, literally in that same rally, people are yelling, Kemp needs to go to prison. I'm like, this is your governor. And she's the chair. It's like, we need to focus on January 5th and they're focusing on November 3rd. And then literally, Lynn Wood and Sidney Powell. These are two attorneys, two attorneys who are helping the president have been involved in the president's efforts now sort of working parallel to them supporting the president i mean linwood goes out there in a maga hat and he says something crazy about gab we're not gabriel we're not going to sell our votes to china i'm somebody asked

what i mean it's like who the hell knows i have no idea what he's talking about at this point but in that same rally they said you can't trust these machines we got to send a message you're not going to vote for senator perdu and leffler it was supposed to be a republican rally and there all these people in the audience like, yeah. I'm like, and then the president's coming to Val Dosta, Georgia on Saturday until we'll vote. I mean, I'm sure it'll be about a two-hour rally of which will be 110 minutes talking about how the election was stolen and 10 minutes talking about senators Purdue and Leffler. I mean, all the confusion and making people question it can undoubtedly only discourage the turnout for Republicans. I mean, it makes no tactical sense. Can I ask another

question, pick it up on Sarah's question just a moment ago about your background. I read in a local article that was published over this past week about sort of your background, your history and politics. And, you know, one of your fellow Sandy Springs Council members, you sit on the Sandy Springs Council. I used to. Or used to. You're still involved in the development, right? The vice chair of the development. I'm coming off the Development Authority, I think, like in two weeks. Okay. So you receive some criticism. from a fellow council member who said, boy, he wasn't anti-Trump enough. So you've been portrayed by Trump supporters as sort of hardcore, long-time, rabid anti-Trump are looking to undermine the

president. How have you viewed the president and his time in office overall? This is one of those things that all of us who are conservatives, we get this sort of twitch, for lack of a better word. know, I love the judges. The judges are fantastic. I love the deregulation. I wouldn't have gone tactically the same way with NATO because I think it's important, but the fact that they're now stepping up and paying more, that's an outcome that I'm happy with. The continued changes to the judiciary are important. And in a weird, bizarre, irono twist, I wonder if we can get to the point where we can show liberals, when you centralize government to a single place and you get the wrong person in there, this is what it looks like for y'all on the site. So maybe we

should devolve some powers down guys here or there. His style is not my style. And I've had to go through that conversation for four years. Listen, we all struggle with this. And I was never part of the Never Trump or thing. I mean, I did a few tweets here and there on the tariff stuff that I did. That's not a smart thing to do. I still think some of the things he canceled on. But I still think Paris Climate Agreement was stupid. It was good to get out of it. I mean, but the part of the problem, when you have essentially at the end of the day, a queen's contractor, I know guys from New York who are contractors and, you know, small business guys, when they're agreeing with you, it feels like they're arguing with you.

I mean, so style-wise on nothing, but also, there's one thing that's always been a real problem for me, it's sort of a disconnectedness from the facts sometimes. And we sort of all kind of got steeped in it with like, We know what he means, but don't take him literally. And after a while, you just kind of, people started to take that, which then undermined the ability now to argue about the fact he's just factually, provably wrong on all these things, these conspiracy theories around the election. It's always been uncomfortable for me.

I've got family members who are much more, I mean, went to Trump boat rallies, you know, stuff like that. And they are convinced, and I've gotten convinced that it wasn't necessarily stolen, at least not in Georgia. I'm not going to speak for Philadelphia. but there's a long history there, but in Georgia, we ran a really well-done election, in our opinion. In fact, the bizarre part was we had a horrible election, not a horrible. We had one county, Fulton County, which continually screws things up, you know. There's one in every family.

Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely. I was talking to a reporter yesterday. We were doing the recount, and they were off by 3,000, and we were supposedly done. I got on the phone, and he said, what's going on? I said, I'm going to give you three guesses, but you need one. There's one county because the Fulton was like, winter, winter, chicken dinner. Okay, there you go. And so they had some real problems in June.

We worked really hard. We launched a lot of technology, really up the training, recruited 50,000 poll workers. Our average wait time in Georgia in November, on November 3rd was three minutes. It was two minutes by the end of the day. So we had defeated every obstacle we had to have a good smooth election with a record turnout.

We had over 5 million voters. The record turnout before that was like 4.2, I think. So we really, from our opinion, we crushed it. So like Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, we're doing a victory lap. Then Wednesday evening, I'm looking at the numbers coming in. I'm going back to my old political consulting days. I'm going, I'm looking at him, seeing what's out, knowing what's still out, going, yeah, that's absentee ballots that are still out. Biden's really doing that well.

It's in Metro Atlanta. And I kind of ran some quick numbers, kind of knowing what was there. I said, Trump's going to lose by about 10,000 votes. And it ended up being 14,000 and got knocked down to 13,000. So I knew, I said, we were going to be in for an issue. So it was not, it was not totally unexpected because the other part about this, if anybody knows Georgia, it has been trending this way. There was a reason Stacey Abrams got within 55,000 votes of Brian Kemp two years ago.

Right. And there was, you took eight, you take six metro counties and the two counties around the University of Georgia, Clark and O'Connor, and Senator Purdue got 19,800 more votes than President Trump. That's more than the margin. I mean, there was a group of Republicans who were done. They were sick of it, and they abandoned the president. I mean, I remember watching the results come in, and David Purdue was leading the president.

In every nation in the country, I mean, every state in the country, you never see the top of the ticket trailing, the second side of the ticket, except maybe in Maine, where Susan Collins will always beat the Republican presidential candidates. That's not normal here in Georgia. So why do you think this is caught on with voters? And what can you do to fix it now? Emotion, anger, and fear, which is the ways that both extremes of the party now have to gin up their base. We've gone from trying to win the middle to base-level politics on both sides. And emotion and fear are always going to be better than hope and policy. That's the case.

And I think you're probably right. Then you're never going to convince them that this was a fair election. Time. Time will do it to a degree. People get tired. We're watching this stuff. There's a fatigue that's already set in. We've seen 70% I think right now Republicans think it was fraudulent. I think that's dropped down to like 55%. I think as he continues to make the claims and the court cases keep getting tossed and the evidence doesn't show up and things like that. Time can do some of this. But there's going to be a swath. You're right. They're never, ever, Sarah, ever going to accept that this was a fair election. access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply.

Learn more at amex.ca. slash Yannex. Let me ask you a bit about the future of the Republican Party and the future of conservatives. You rather famously earlier this week gave a press conference in which you denounced Republican officials for amplifying these crazy conspiracies. It got up a lot of attention. I think it was sort of well-earned, righteous indignation on the part of you're speaking for Republicans who are frustrated by this.

If that goes away, let's say that people, let's say that your answer is right, that people gradually come to understand that the things that are being alleged here just are true. What does it mean for the Republican Party? What does it mean for Donald Trump's political future? And how much of a hold do you expect that he'll continue to have on this hardcore base of the party? On the hardcore base, I think he will have as much hold as he chooses to have. And I think he will continue to try to use that.

And I fully anticipate that in true Trumpian fashion that on inauguration day, January 20th, it's 2021, he will have an announcement rally that he's running for president in 2024. I'm putting my money bet down right now. That's as likely what's going to happen. And he will also be doing, what do you call it, raising money, supporting candidates and primaries, and doing all those kinds of things in the meantime. So he will attempt to have a sway on the party. And there's not a similar figure counterweight out there to, at least not the existence right now,

that can, you know, sort of lean against that. And the traditional party apparatus is now pretty much manned by that, by the Trump team. And even inside the Trump team itself, there's sort of like, as I understand that there's just a couple of, there's a couple of camps about the, let's go ahead and give in or let's go ahead and keep fighting. And I don't want to get into the rumor level. I'm not going to get too much into that. But this, there's, there's a, he will have as much influence as he wants. And the question comes to, he got through last time the same reason with, I guess we had 16 candidates at one point, all he had to do is get 30% inside each one of those things. And then all of a sudden, you get that snowball effect.

Then you get the winner take all primaries. And you get there. I mean, I think 2022 is going to be telling because what you saw he lost this time was the suburbs. Right. If you look at it, especially in Georgia, if you look at a map where the, where, you're, where the suburbs where he lost was they got a lot more blue was the suburbs of all of our main areas. There's just like a blue ring where he went down. But in the city of Atlanta itself, he went up a little bit in the actual city of Atlanta. But in the suburbs surrounding the city

of Atlanta, he started getting his butt kicked. Suburban women, demographic changes in those areas. And the rural areas where he really outperforms some more have shrinking populations for the most part right now. So demographically, you need that base to win. but it's not a growing base. And at some point, Stephen, if I can go off on my own little rant of my, how I feel about these things, if you don't mind for a second.

Yeah, please. I came out of a city government. You know, that's where I worked. It was really funny. I started my politics at the national level, went down to state level, then finally got elected for the first time. As a political consultant,

I always tell people never run for city council, school board, or county commission because everybody knows where you live and they were always going to be pissed at you. Because you're affecting their direct lives. You know, I got a pothole. My kid, this redistrict is going to be in the end of my schools. This sucks.

So I adore my own advice, and I ran for city council. It's all about getting things done and making government function. I've always believed that the best kind of government is you don't think about it. It's, you know, your roads are supposed to get paved. The lights are supposed to be time. The police are supposed to show up. It's in the background of people's lives. Yeah, exactly.

And when you have a functional system like that, but then the other parts of it is, your charities, your church, your, they all function in a healthy environment in these situations and step in a lot of those areas. What we've gotten away from as we've centralized more and more power

is people just offloading that responsibility. And the further you get elected officials away from this, there's a reason to a degree you're seeing a lot more, a lot of the criticism of our office isn't coming from our state senator, our county commissioners or stuff to hear. It's coming people in D.C. because Donald Trump said, you need to criticize this.

They're a congressman who are, backing us still, but they're in D.C., and they're getting the loudest voices that are coming through. And I'm kind of a Burkean on this thing. I love being a podcast where I can say that, people know what I'm talking about. Yes, we will know. Exactly. So I said, you get elected for your judgment, not to be a weather vein for your constituents. You take their their thoughts into account and explain to them or listen to them or go through it, but at the end of the day, you have to do what's the right thing for the long term. I think one of the big things we've gotten away from is everybody's focused on the fundraising goal, the election in two years, and they're

not looking at the long term, which is why we have a ridiculous national debt. They're not looking a long term, which is why we have, you know, military bases that we keep on shuffling things. And they, the procurement, I mean, I can get into the weeds of all this. And you've seen some of the things that they've been called, I've been called wonkish and detail oriented, because those are where the real things happen. Yeah. And we don't have people who are elected. There's a part of me, even though it would violate every constitutional thing. Before you get elected to anything higher, you have to go to a local, through some kind of local election first and serve. That way you have some sense of obligation to the people who are actually on the ground. And see what

the actual day-to-day problems are. I think if you write a memoir, you could call it reflections on the revolution in Georgia. I already had a name in mind. That's interesting. That's not bad. I mean, it's a through line on Edmund Burke, right? Yes, yes, it is. All right. All right. All right. Thank you so much for your time today. I do have one last question. Yeah. We are all rooting for you to keep our elections fair and safe and efficient and all the things that I think it sounds like you guys did really well in Georgia. But there is something else that you do that we need to dive into. We need a little transparency on. My understanding is that your fried okra is the best fried okra.

and I'm wondering what the secret is because, you know, it always turns out a little soggy over here. The main thing you get, the problem with any kind of fried okra is it is not one of the things you can pre-prepure. It has to be, when you're ready to sit down, you have to do it in batches right then and there. The other thing is dredge in milk and some milk and stirred up egg. That's your dredge.

Then you take your cornmeal or you're sorry, your breadcrumbs, and I always put a little bit of cayenne pepper. There's no I use cornmeal, a little bit of cayenne pepper to add a little bit of heat to it. And then you've got to put it in a cast iron skillet at high heat and do single layers at a time. Don't worry about deep frying them. Single layers at a time, scoop them out, immediately put them on a paper towel, drain them and serve them. Do not let them sit because they will get soggy in a heartbeat. Do you serve them with anything or you just eat them? Oh, well, I would just eat them. But generally speaking, you'd serve them. We serve around 4th of July.

And those kind of, you normal kind of other foods with that fried chicken's always good. And my stepmom one time was going through South Georgians. She found a vegetable that she'd never seen before. And she asked the person at the stand, how you would prepare it. She goes, like everything else, honey, you're doing batter and fry it. Do you use a sauce? This is important. What are the appropriate sauces, dipping sauces?

There's any white Alabama barbecue sauce is a good dipping sauce. A rom-a-lod is always going to be a good dipping sauce. I personally don't use sauces because I like. getting the actual flavor of things. And if I do use sauces, they use light sauces. My fiance is really, really, she loves her dipping sauces. So we're slightly different on that one. There's probably a few more things that y'all will find over time that you might differ on, but maybe not. Maybe not. Thank you again so much for your time today. Thank you listeners for joining us every week. We look forward to talking to you again next week.

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