The Dispatch Podcast - Raffensperger on the Need for Integrity

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

On today’s podcast, Sarah and Steve are joined by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In 2020, Georgia was at the center of claims of voter fraud that kept President Trump from returning to the White House, and before that in 2018, the state was the site of claims of voter suppression that kept Stacey Abrams from the governor’s mansion. Raffensperger, author of the new book Integrity Counts, tells our hosts why Americans should have confidence and trust in our country’s elections.   Show Notes: -Axios: “Trump-backed Perdue says he wouldn’t have certified Georgia 2020 results” -Integrity Counts, by Brad Raffensperger Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes. And this week, we are talking to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffsenberger. You may think that name is familiar because you heard a lot about Secretary Raffsenberger around the 2020 election, a secret phone call between the president and Secretary of State Rapsenberger. We'll talk about it all here on the podcast. He also is the author of a new book, Integrity counts. Let's dive right in. First, there's now, of course, a primary challenge to the governor of Georgia. Former Senator Purdue is challenging Governor Kemp saying that he, Purdue would not have certified the election if he had been governor at that point.

I'm curious if you can walk us through what that would have looked like if that had transpired in 2020. If it had been Governor Purdue, if he hadn't certified the election results, how would that have gone down in your state? Well, what David Purdue has just said is that he would have violated state law and also our state constitution. And what he's really trying to tell you is that he, He is going to throw the rule of law out the window, and he's going to govern by the rule of man. That's very dangerous for a public to ever go down that path. And so if the governor at that point had said, no, I'm not certifying these results, what would happen next?

I assume there'd be lawsuits. You would have had some role in this. What would have happened in Georgia? Well, I'm sure there would have been an avalanche of lawsuits. And at the end of the day, you would have had federal courts involved. But at the end of the day, what people need to understand is that we had a fair and honest election here in Georgia, that 28,000 Georgians skipped the presidential ballot. They didn't vote for anyone, and yet they voted down ballots.

They voted for the county commissioner, voted for congressmen and perhaps a senator, voted for perhaps the county librarian. They skipped the presidential ballot. Didn't vote for anyone. And in the Republican congressional areas, 33,000 Georgians skipped or skipped President Trump because the Republicans actually received 33,000 more votes in the Republican congressional areas. Pretty amazing statistics and numbers. I don't think people have necessarily grappled with them,

both in terms of what they meant for the current makeup of the U.S. Senate and also what they meant for the outcome of the presidential election in Georgia. I want to go back when you read about this in your book and talk to you a little bit about the phone call, the thing that first introduced you to so many Americans, who suddenly took a keen interest in Georgia's Secretary of State and the conversations that you had. In the call, we later heard the recording, in the call, President Trump is very specific

about the number of votes that he thinks he needs. As you're listening to that, and you're listening to the rest of the call, is there a moment where you say to yourself, this is the President of the United States asking me to, Cheap? Well, President Trump was looking for 11,780 votes, one more than he needed to win. But I knew that we had the data on our side. We had all the facts. And my question that I was really asking myself is, does he really believe what he's saying? Or, you know, has he been so misled by all of his advisors? But in the day, it didn't really matter how he got to where he's at. He just didn't have the right data. And we did. President Trump didn't have the votes to win.

and therefore, you know, he could ask, but there weren't any votes to find. Every allegation that they had made since the November election, we went down that rabbit trail and checked everything out. They said that there was 10,315 dead people. We found two, and that's the two I reported in my January 6th letter to Congress. Since then, we found two more. That's four dead people. They said there were thousands of, you know, felons that voted.

We found 79. 79 total felons that voted in that race. They said that there was 2,400 non-registered voters. There were zero. They said there are 66,000 underage voters. There were zero. There's all those data points. They were just wrong, flat wrong.

And so that's what we need to let him know. And then he was flat wrong about what happened at State Farm Arena. Rudy Giuliani came down to the state Senate. He was not sworn in, did not take an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help him God, and said whatever he pleased. He took a video, sliced and diced it out of sequence, and then he said, look at them, their ballot stuffing. No, they weren't. And that's why we called it in the GBI and that's what we called in the FBI to make sure we had additional law enforcement eyes to look at.

There was nothing there. And then finally, when President Trump had B.J. Pack replaced with Bobby Christine, who was from the Southern District, the U.S. attorney there, became the acting U.S. attorney from the Northern District. Bobby Christine looked into State Farm, and he was recorded by the AJC saying that there was nothing there also. And so we looked at that extensively. Every allegation was made, none of it was ever supported by the fact. But the cold, hard reality is that 28,000 Georgians skipped the presidential ballot. And that tells you the whole story right there.

Let me follow up on that. What you've just given us is a very succinct and compelling recitation of the facts. this is what happened. This is what the data tell us. These are the numbers. There are, of course, hundreds of thousands of Georgians who don't believe them. Georgia Republicans who think that when you say these things, you're lying to them. What do you say when you talk to those folks who don't believe the numbers that you provide them? I mean, surely you've had these conversations. with people who are close to you, or maybe at one point we're close to you. What do you say when they say that's just not true?

Well, I wrote a 10-page letter to Congress, January 6th, they got it. Now, they may not have read it because they were kind of busy with some other issues earlier in the day, but they got it. It's fact-based. And when we wrote that letter, I wanted to make sure that if you called me to Congress to testify and put my hand on the Bible, that I could do so honestly. because everything was truthful and that record stands they've had that letter now for 11 months and do you know that on a single congressperson not a single any person ever has written me a letter

back and said hey we looked at your data and you're wrong on this point or at this point no one has ever said that you're wrong on any of the points because it is the facts hey i'm as a republican am i disappointed yes but president trump came up short and perhaps the biggest reason he came up short is that those 28,000 Georgians skip the presidential ballot. And that's not my fault. That's the fault of a campaign that didn't turn out its people. So probably should talk to whoever's running the campaign than whoever runs the state political party here in Georgia for the Republican Party.

So something I hear from, you know, smart, thoughtful Republicans is that fine, you know, yeah, there weren't suitcases full of ballots underneath the table or dead people voting. But look, because of the pandemic, Democrats changed a lot of the rules for voting. They loosened a lot of the rules for absentee ballots or changed the ways for ballot collection to happen in a lot of these states. And that that was not the legal process by which to change the voting rules. And that's what made the election, quote unquote, stolen, not dead people voting, but unfair rule changes. You know, you can't change the rules of the game halfway through the game when it comes to a presidential election. I'm wondering if you can speak to

that. What about that rings true in Georgia? What doesn't ring true? And how much you think that affected the outcome of the vote in Georgia? Well, in Georgia, we didn't change any of the rules. In fact, we signed a settlement agreement that has been misnamed and called a consent agreement. The settlement agreement related to signature match, actually strengthened signature match. Mark Elias and the Democrat Party sued us. And we were in the process of winning that. So we got them to a settlement agreement. And they agreed to several things. One is that we would keep signature match when you send in your absentee ballot. Then when you sent in, we would keep signature match when you send in your absentee ballot application. So the signature would be verified. Then when you

went ahead and sent in your absentee ballot, it would be signature matched again. Nothing changed. that is what state law is. And so we can't change that process. And so we kept signature match intact. We also got the Democrats to agree that they would not come back and sue us later about signature match for the remainder of the 2020 cycle. And then as it relates to the absentee ballot cure process,

if you question it, that absolutely ballot cure process was actually codified in state law by the legislature in 2019. So nothing was changed in state law at all. Then I've matched, I followed that up, and I made sure that we had GBI signature match training for all 159 counties. But here's the proof. It's in the numbers.

Back in 2018, we had 0.18% of all ballots were rejected for signature matching issues. In 2020, we had 0.20% of all ballots rejected for signature matching issues, virtually the same. Actually a little bit higher, but we can say it's virtually the same. so therefore there's nothing to truth the facts don't support it but that was really people just trying to try to find an excuse and blame shift why the state political party did not turn out those 28,000 voters who skipped the presidential ballot and when i want to go a little bit to the stacey abram's race she's of course running again um governor kemp getting challenged from all sides right he has a primary challenge coming at him from the right in the republican primary

and then general election challenge from someone very well known in the state. Stacey Abrams ran, of course, and lost to Governor Kemp last time around. She never conceded that race. What is their claim that the election, that election was stolen, and what validity should we give to any of that? What Stacey Abrams said, we should give no validity to it. She lost the governor's race in 2018 by 55. thousand votes. In fact, mid-October, she was up in Virginia campaigning for McCullough, and she said, just because you win doesn't mean you've won. And so she still today has still not

conceded that race. And her whole stolen election claim was based on voter suppression. Meanwhile, we had record turnout of four million people, highest number ever, and record registrations. And to the Department of Driver's Services is how we register most of our voters. We do a robust of are you a resident of Georgia and then also are you an American citizen and that's very important and we do that robust check but that's why we have strong robust checks and we have strong registration numbers never been easier to vote in Georgia but we do have appropriate guardrails so it's tough to cheat we have photo ID and now with SB 202 we have photo ID for the absentee ballot process also her myth is that one side of the coin last year in

2020 it was the other side of the coin of stolen an election claim of voter fraud. Neither one of them are supported by the facts. But in this upcoming election, then it seems to me that we're going to have in Georgia, this governor's race, you know, two different candidates who claim that elections are stolen for different reasons. How concerned should you be if you're a Georgia voter that, I don't know, how can we have a fair election when both sides think that the election has been stolen by the other? Well, that's why in 2020, we stood up some programs that were statewide programs to talk about see something, say something about voter fraud to make sure that people understood we're going

to have a safe and secure election. That's why with SB 202, we've strengthened up and really voters' confidence and move, you know, away from signature match exclusively, and now we've incorporated driver's license number with photo ID to short voter confidence on the absentee ballot process. We want people understand that your vote will be accurately counted. And if you ask for absentee ballot, everyone will know that we know who you are and that you are a lawful Georgia resident requesting that absentee ballot. But do you feel a little like Kevin Bacon and Animal House screaming all as well

as like, you know, people are running down the parade route, yelling and throwing things? I feel like you're coming at this very rationally with a lot of facts. But if you poll people, again, sort of regardless of what partisan side they're on, they don't think there's going to be a fair election. Well, that's why we'll do voter education. I know the county election offices will. And any political party or any campaign that thinks it's smart to tell people that you can't trust the vote, all that's going to do is to depress your own turnout, doesn't depress

the other side. And so they need to knock it off and understand, you're going to win or lose this race on your own merits. Do you have a vision? Do you have a positive uplifted vision? And what are you going to do about inflation? What are you going to do about the supply chain? Things like that.

And that's more national than it is statewide. But look at what we have going on in Georgia. We've had great leadership. We have 3.1% unemployment lowest ever. Best place to do business seven years in a row. And last year, in 2020, we had record corporation formation. I'm really proud of that in the Secretary of State's office to help facilitate all these new business owners, new entrepreneurs.

And that's what we want to continue to do is make it great. easy to build a business here in Georgia. So if you look back at 2018 and 2020, just to pick up on serious point and flash forward to the fact that, you know, election integrity is going to be certainly a primary issue, maybe the main issue in the public debates that we have, that you have in Georgia that I think we have nationally leading up to the 2022 elections. How, and you look at the changes that have been made, you mentioned SB 202, a lot of those changes made sense, made common sense, were mischaracterized, frankly, I think, by the Biden

White House, by Democrats. But there were other things that make me uneasy, taking you out of the sort of final process and substituting in the legislature, something that's happened in Georgia that's going to happen in Georgia, something that's been proposed across. the country, you see other election reform proposals from Republicans that seem to be injecting politics into elections rather than withdrawing politics from the elections. My big picture question against all of that backdrop is, how alarmed should we be? If you're an average citizen, if you live in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin or Omaha, Nebraska, and you're following this

as a newspaper reader, a concerned citizen. Some days I wake up, and I think, look, everything worked out. 2020 happened. We have people like you who sort of stood up and said, no, I'm not going to let them try to cheat. And you can recite the facts as you just have. On other days, I look at what's taking place now on a daily basis and think, we're not alarmed enough. You had the White House chief of staff yesterday have revealed.

a PowerPoint presentation he put together on how to steal the election, the White House chief of staff. So should we be really alarmed or should we be not alarmed as much as some people are? Well, it's that two parts. Number one, in Georgia,

if you look at SB 202, we had a lot of bills that were filed in the last session we had, but they just really never got a hearing because they didn't deserve one. They were just really stuff that was very reaction. At the end of the day, what came through, there was measured, solid piece of legislation,

photo ID, make sure lines stay shorter than one hour, make sure there's no politicking with the 150-foot zone. Making sure if you request you're absolutely about it, it's 11 days cutoff so that you'll get your ballot and actually be able to get it back to the county. Now removing me as chair of the state election board, that's not a personal thing. I just think the state election board should be chaired by an elected official that's held accountable to the voters. So that way, if they don't like something, they know who to call, who to hold accountable to. But by and large, it was very measured and solid piece of legislation.

But I think what the issue that you're really going to is one that's very simple. This is how you fix it overnight. It's called character, integrity, honesty, civil discourse, and kindness. And in my book, Integrity Counts, I quote Ronald Reagan, because I'm going to talk about kindness. I'm going to use a Ronald Reagan quote. So you don't think that I've gone soft somehow, you know, You know, not a rock solid principal conservative.

But you can be a principal conservative and still be kind. You can be a principal conservative and still have conversations with people on the other side of the aisle to see what can we get done for the American people. What can we get done for our Georgian voters? What can we get done for the average Georgian that's trying to put food in the table, figure out how they get enough money for college for the kids and save for retirement, those kind of issues. But it gets back to, you know, Peggy Nuddin wrote,

a great book when character was king. It's a story of Ronald Reagan. And that's what we really need in America. We need it on both sides of the aisle, but as a Republican, we need to fix our house and get it in order. Don't be, you know, pointing across someone else's backyard. Let's clean up our own backyard first. And we have people of noble character running up and down from the top of the ticket down to the water and sewer board. America will be a whole lot better place. 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 security brings real

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from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's eth-h-o-s dot com slash dispatch application times may vary rates may vary we've got these people running for offices like yours more local offices who believe again on both sides of the island a lot of cases although i think the ones getting the most media attention are often from the republican side who believe these elections are stolen uh believe that the 2020 election was stolen at least and i'm curious if you can walk us through what someone in a position like yours, if they wanted to, you know, sort of an ends justify the means reaction to the 2020 election, if they wanted to, quote, unquote, find those votes that the president asked you to find, what could someone in your position

without integrity, let's say, do? Well, first of all, you'd be violating the state law and the Constitution, and you'd be subject to an investigation, and I think at the end of the day, you'd end up in prison, and that's where you belong. Our job is to make sure we have fair and honest elections, and people need to understand the processes. They need to, first of all, understand, in Georgia, the counties run the elections, but it really goes all the way down to the precinct level. So at the precinct, those people work in those 14, 16-hour days on Election Day.

Those are your neighbors. Those are the people you see at the grocery store. You see them up, Rotary, Kiwanas, church group, out at the ball fields. Those are your neighbors. And they have that core integrity that is really important for the process. They're just trying to do their job. Don't get paid a lot to do it because they want to give back to their communities. In your county election offices, we have 159 counties in Georgia.

And I know they've sumbling left, something right, right down the middle. But everyone is looking down that thin blue line that law enforcement has, just like they have in elections. It's that line of red, white, blue to make sure we have honest and fair elections. And so that's what's really important. And when you have integrity up and down the system, and then you have checks, checks and double checks and triple checks, to make sure all the numbers line up, when you have a paper ballot and you can do a 100% hand recount to verify the results, all five million ballots in Georgia were recounted.

It came within just a couple thousand vote different and still showed that President Trump came up short. Then we rescanned those ballots again for the third time and get virtually the same result. And it showed that President Trump came up shortly three times. We checked, checked, and triple-checked, and we know that at the end of the day, our results are right. One of the things that was mentioned in Mark Meadows, Donald Trump's former chief of staff, PowerPoint presentation was foreign election interference. And there's been obviously a wide range of conspiracy theories about whether it was the Chinese or the Italians or you name it, hacking into our voting systems and changing outcomes, changing talents. That was subject of a lot of the BS around the Dominion charges, Smartmatic, what have you.

Is that possible? When you have a paper ballot system and you do 100% recount, and you do 100% recount. What have you just verified? You actually sat people down at a table, and they hand-read all five million ballots. Who did you want for president? Joseph R. Biden, Donald J. Trump, or Joe Jorgensen, the Libertarian candidate. And that verified that the paper ballots were accurate when they were scanned. But we also showed we did diagnostics, so we did a forensic audit of a select number of machines

to prove that the machines had not been hacked. We also had on election night had DHS, people from CISIS. that come in and sit in our office, and they're actually out there looking at threat vectors, not just what we could have from international sources, but anything domestic also. And so we're very cognizant, very wary, and concerned about any type of cybersecurity hack. But people have to understand that none of our equipment on Election Day is connected to the Internet. You have three pieces when you show up at Georgia on a poll place. The poll pat, it's not connected to the Internet once it's ready to go on Election Day.

the ballot marking device is just a dummy printer that sits there and you make your selections and then it prints out a paper ballot it's not connected connected to the other two pieces of equipment none of the equipment's connected then you take your paper ballot over to the scanner when you take it over to the scanner you then are scanning your ballot that's not connected to the internet it has two flash drives on the back but when you press your button to tabulate at the end of the election day it prints out a tape and it's that paper that we actually then look at what the totals are by precinct. That's what the counties use.

It's not connected again to the Internet. Then the counties report that to us, and that at one point that will be an Internet connection that is secured. But we also have the paper copy of what the tabulations were. Something would be reported if something happened. That is just absolutely ludicrous what people have said. It's been disproven. When you do a 100% hand recount of the paper ballots,

It shows conclusively that we were not hacked, and the count total was accurate. So if Brad had a magic wand nationally and could set federal guidelines for voting, I'm curious if there are things that you think could make our elections. More secure is one way to put it, but just more where people could have more confidence. And then, for instance, we know some states have gone to all mail-in ballots. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see a future where we can just vote on our phones and you never need to go to a polling place?

Would there ever be a way to secure that? I don't know. I'm curious about your thoughts on the future of voting in this country. Well, as a future for voting, I talked to a professor in one of our lawsuits, very, very sharp fellow. And he said, we're nowhere near being able to vote by phone. Now, he did say maybe 10, 20, at some point in time,

You know, obviously the generation coming up is used to doing everything on phone, but it's just not secure enough. So today with what we have right now, what we really need is NVRA of 1993 that was signed into law by Bill Clinton, the Republican House, by Democrat House and the Democrat Congress. Now, we need that to be updated, and here's why. We cannot update our voter rolls 90 days before an election, but yet we have to put people on the vote rolls 30 days out. But studies show that 11% of all Americans move every year. We have 7.5 million voters in Georgia. That's 800,000 Georgians that have moved over the course of a year, statistically speaking. That means they could move in-state, out-of-state.

That means that they can move within the county, out of the county. And that 800,000 over that 90-day period equals 25% of that, which is 200,000 voters that have moved. We don't know where they've moved to. Are they in the county, out of the precinct? is such dynamic mobility. And when you have a year, we have a presidential primary, then you have the general primary, then you have a primary runoff, then you have the November race, then you have a runoff race.

We can't update our vote rolls during election years. And that just really helps you, it really makes it difficult for the counties to keep their list clean and accurate. And so we work hard on that, but federal obstacles have really hurt us. And what's really sad is when we had a Republican president, Republican House, Republican Senate. They didn't do a single piece of election reform legislation.

But as soon as it flipped and Nancy Pelosi, you know, owned the place, guess what she did? She started shoving down her HR1, and then she came back two years later with HR1 on steroids. And right now we're looking at HR4. All of that is federal takeover of elections. We do not need a federal takeover elections. The states do a good job. We have no serious absentee voting. We have now up to 19 days of early voting, and we have election day voting.

We have all three forms. We have photo ID. We think we've hit the right mark with the proper balance of accessibility with security. And we think we're doing it right. We just can't control what other people say. But we do have safe and secure elections in Georgia. I think federal law is one of the things we need to work on changing. All right.

Last question. This may be too personal. Just take it where you want to take it. But I feel like the Georgia football season was a real roller coaster. And I'm curious now that the ride is at least, you know, you can sort of see the end of the roller coaster ride, how you feel reflecting on a year that had so many ups and some important downs. It only had one down. It had one really important down, though. Yeah, and you must be from Alabama or something like that.

But I'll let that go. But what I'll say is Alabama brought their A game and we brought our C game. And we now know we're going to bring the A game. We've got to bring the A game against Michigan. We've got to bring the A game against whoever beats, you know, in that Alabama, Cincinnati game. But Georgia has a team, and if we bring our A game, we will win the national championship. That's what we need to do is bring the A game.

I'm from Texas. So it's mostly just that University of Texas has been so abysmal that it's, I want to bring everyone down into my pit. Well, the SEC is the championship conference. and I believe that we'll win the national championship again this year. All right. Well, go dogs. We'll be rooting for you.

Thank you so much for joining the podcast this week. We really appreciated your time. Go dogs. With Amex Platinum, 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. Terms and conditions apply.

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