The New Yorker Radio Hour - Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger, Who Refused to “Find” Votes for Donald Trump, Prepares for Another Election

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Brad Raffensperger, who holds the usually low-profile office of secretary of state in Georgia, became famous after he recorded a phone call with Donald Trump. Shortly after the 2020 election, Trump demanded that Georgia officials “find 11,780 votes” so that he could win the state. The recorded phone conversation is a linchpin in the Fulton County racketeering case against Trump. Refusing that demand, Raffensperger—a lifelong Republican—received death threats from enraged Trumpists, and the state senate still wants to investigate him for it. But the politician tells David Remnick that he hasn’t lost faith in his party. He believes he can convince election deniers of the fairness of Georgia’s methods. And, by the way, that story line on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” about the Georgia crime of giving a person water while they wait in line to vote? Raffensperger has a suggestion for Larry David. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramnick. If you can name the Secretary of State for whatever state you live in, go ahead and give yourself a gold star in civics. But to be honest, I can't name mine. I can't name any of the other 49 secretaries of state either. Well, there's one big exception. Brad Raffensberger, the Secretary of State for Georgia. He became a national figure during a phone call that you probably heard about. So, look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have, because we won the state.

That was Donald Trump after the 2020 election, and he was in a lousy mood. You guys are so wrong, and you've treated this, you've treated this. You've treated the. population of Georgia so badly. But why wouldn't you want to find the right answer, Brad, instead of keep saying that the numbers are right? Because those numbers are so wrong. After resisting Trump's demands,

Raffensberger became the target of death threats from people in his own Republican Party. The phone call is a linchpin in the racketeering case against Trump, led by the Fulton County DA, Fannie Willis. So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.

Whatever happens in the criminal case, and who knows when it'll come, there's no doubt that Georgia will play a critical role in the election. One solidly Republican, Georgia went for Joe Biden in 2020 and gave both of its Senate seats to Democrats, and Raffensberger, who enraged the MAGA faction, was easily reelected. But when I spoke with Brad Raffensberger recently, I got to feel for just how precarious a position he's in. He's taking pains not to antagonize anybody in a party that is still overwhelmingly turning out for Donald Trump.

There have been multiple recounts, lawsuits, investigations, all confirming that Joe Biden was the winner in the state of Georgia in 2020. Now, Republicans in the state Senate want to investigate you for not overturning the results. What is your life like these days, and when is this going to stop? Well, right now we're focused on the 20-24 elections. We don't look backwards. Some people like to live in the past. We live really in the now.

And that's making sure everyone's prepared. We have new congressional districts for 2024, and the counties have those correct. We just didn't finish up our ballot building for the upcoming May primary. So we have that on our plate, and then we're looking at other threat vectors, such as cybersecurity or AI, things like that. So that keeps us busy. I'm sure it does, and I know your plate is very full with the present tense in the future, and yet people in the Republican Party are all over you about the past. So how do you answer them? Well, number one, I give them two data points in the 2020 election. We actually had about 33,000 voters, Republican voters,

that didn't come back at all to vote in the fall. And then the one, the one, All the voters that did show up, but we noticed that there was 27,900 voters that skipped the top of the ticket, and the Republican congressman got about 27,500 more votes than President Trump. But our job was really to verify the result. All five million ballots, they were recounted on 100 percent hand recount. And the results were virtually the same. We had some counties that had three counts in those ballots, and there was no difference whatsoever. But you have a party in the state Senate that still wants to investigate you for not overturning the results.

that tell you about the state of the Republican Party, which you've belonged for a very long time? Well, I know that if you look at the results of the voters, I believe it was 99% had a good voting experience. They trusted the results. And also then just didn't really enjoy the experience because we've worked hard on making sure we keep those lines short, get the results posted quickly. So the voters give us high marks, and then that's who I work for. The criminal case against Donald Trump for election interference in Georgia has run into I think it's no exaggeration to say serious trouble related to the district attorney there,

Fannie Willis. Can that case be salvaged or is it permanently damaged by questions about Fonnie Willis's ethics? Well, I've been advised that I'm a potential witness for that case and I've been told that I should not comment further on that case. So that's where I have to leave that today.

Did you ever, in your wildest imagination, think that the issue of voting, in the state of Georgia would become the issue it is, both in a serious sense, and also the subject of curb your enthusiasm. You know what? I got some water in the car. Do you want it? I would love it. Yeah. There you go. I knew this would come in handy.

What you... Sir! You under arrest for violation of the Election Integrity Act. What are you talking about? It is illegal for anyone in the state of Georgia to provide food or water to voters in line of the polls. What? That's barbaric! What kind of? Are you serious?

I'm dead serious. She's coming with me. You can't deal. Oh, no, you're making a big mistake. I'm sorry, baby. I forgot. I'm not even... So the so-called violation of giving somebody a bottle of water online becomes a plot point for Larry David.

Well, I'm sure he enjoyed that, and I enjoyed writing my letter back to him. I thought... What did you say to Larry Day? Well, I told him basically, I'm sorry that he didn't get the... You're more welcome and VIP treatment that some celebrities and, you know, I thought he was a... the athletic stars get when they spend a few times, a few hours in the Fulton County Jail. But here's really the fact about it. This is what's really crazy is that in New York State, you cannot give anyone a bottle of water within that 150-foot zone.

Yeah, I think it's 100 feet in New York. And in Georgia, what we found, though, is it wasn't the water issue. It was really politicking issues. People were electioneering within 150-foot zone. They grabbed a bottle of water, but then they were coming in there, them blazoned with their t-shirt, and you know what cause they were supporting, and they're trying to, quote, touch voters one more time before they went into vote. And we just want to have that to be a, just leave people alone, let them make their own decisions. And so that's really why we wanted to clarify that with state law. But really, next year, maybe Larry David died to go up to New York and talk about their laws.

That's his home state, you know. And so it seems he's retired. It's kind of like you clean up your own house before you start picking on Georgia. You know, we have shown that we have fair, honest, and accurate elections. Well, when you encounter an election denier and you, life just out and about. Do you find that you can convert an election deniers opinion while you're having a conversation over a cup of coffee or an encounter on the street? Well, it probably takes more than just two minutes. We talk about people switching votes, the first one of that, Stacey Abrams.

No one wants to talk about that. But after she lost, we had record turnout. We had four million people show up for the gubernator race in 2018. Record turnout. And she started talking about voter suppression, and she said the machines were flipping the votes. So, you know, and that with the old machines, and we did not have a verifiable paper ballot. And so... I take your point, but the one difference between Stacey Abrams and President Trump is I don't think you've got a phone call from Stacey Abrams trying to lean on you like in something out of Goodfellas or the Godfather.

Well, at the end of the day, what we've shown is that we do have accurate results. And so we have a paper ballot, and you can recount all 100% of them if you want to, if you need to, if it's that close. Talk to me a little bit about... what your life was like for you after the infamous phone call with Donald Trump, when you declined to find, find in quotes, the 11,000 votes he was asking for. So I understand that you received death threats. This must have been terrifying to you and your family. Well, we got all those actually back in November, so in December. And like I said, it was a shock to the system.

You have to think, Georgia had been reliably Republican for 20 years. We had the state house, the state senate, all the constitutional officers, and then all of a sudden we had this thing, you know, that flipped the other way. But I think if people really were watching what happened in 2018, Stacey Abrams lost by 55,000 votes. And that was actually pretty close because you look at some of the other races. So obviously the Democrats have gained crowned. But we expect a big turnout. There's no reason not to expect five million voters. We had five million show up in 2020 and wait COVID. And it doesn't look like things have, you know, decreased in the decibels of our conversations. So it's highly polarized. Anyone can see that. That's not a political statement.

That's just a statement of fact. Do you ever worry about what might happen in the state if Donald Trump does not take the state this time? No, because I believe at the end of the day, the voters decide these things and we can verify every single vote. But you have to understand, we don't use signature match as the primary means of identifying are absentee ballots. It's photo ID. And that has just increased people's confidence in that. And that's something we actually pulled from Minnesota, which is a Democrat state, Kansas, and Nebraska. Those states have been using that for years. Sir, Donald Trump was talking about rigged elections in 2016. You knew they weren't rigged. You kept faith in him. You voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Will you do so in November? Well, now that I'm Secretary of State,

I've made my position that I don't endorse candidates because I want voters to understand I'm the chief election official for the state. They get me in trouble in 2020 that I didn't endorse, you know, Donald Trump as the candidate. Yes, I did vote for him. I shared that so people understood when I did my job. There's no animosity. I'm a conservative Republican. I voted for the team. I want everyone in the state of Georgia understand we're going to have a fair, honest election.

And it's up to the candidates to turn out their people. But you were in a unique position. You had a president of the United States call you up and lean on you in the most overt way to distort an election. And I just wonder how that did or did not change your view of him. I want to make sure I gave him the information point by point about where we were and why all those allegations. He mentioned that there's 5,000 dead people. I told him that there's two. since then we found two more.

So there's, but it was really the points that he raised, and we just wanted to go back point by point and just let them know that. But he wasn't calling you on the level of information. He could have had any aid do that. He was calling you to lean on you. Well, we had the data on our side. My job is to follow the law, follow the Constitution. But like I said, when we started this off, I'm focused really on 2024.

Given what happened in 2020, to not, let's not talk about you for a moment, but to Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss, who were election workers working honestly, who were falsely accused of stealing votes in Georgia. How do you feel about what happened to Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss, for example? Around the week of January 6th, the FBI informed me that I needed to leave my home for safety. I stayed away from my home for approximately two months. I felt homeless. I felt I can't believe this person has caused this much damage to me and my family

to have to leave my home that I've lived there for 21 years. I've been really clear about that. That was, you know, incredibly unfortunate. It's horrifying. It had been investigated thoroughly, and they didn't do anything wrong. We looked at it with our investigators. The GBI looked at it. The FBI looked at it.

People say, oh, you can't trust the FBI anymore. But guess who else looked at it? President Trump's handpicked U.S. attorney, Bobby Christine, and he found nothing either. But considering what happened to Ruby Freeman and Chey Moss, which sounds terrifying. It was. Have you been having any trouble recruiting election workers? We've done a great job of recruitment. Could we use a few more?

Yes. We're probably good at all the county levels because people look at it as a way that it's a way for them to give back to their community. I'm speaking with Brad Raffensberger. The Secretary of State of Georgia will continue in a moment. You've been a Republican all your life. You voted for Republican candidates, obviously. And yet, I wonder how your view of Donald Trump's honesty or dishonesty was affected by the phone call that you received.

Well, my role model has always been a conservative role model. I grew up with Ronald Reagan, and really he had a captivating personality. He was a committed conservative, but he also had charm. When I was younger, sometimes it would frustrate me that, you know, Reagan would go ahead and reach across the aisle that talked to Tip O'Neill, but he was older and wiser than me, and now I understand the wisdom of Reagan on that. Because if you want to get things done in Congress, you do have to reach across. You want to get as much as you can to your side.

It's interesting. What you're talking about reaching across the aisle is the kind of rhetoric and practice of Joe Biden that he's criticized for sometimes within the Democratic Party. He sounds like you have some affection for Biden's point of view on this. No, I have affection for Ronald Reagan. He's not on the balance, sir. No, I know. But he kind of embodied the American spirit. And I think that's what people really want,

is that spirit of freedom, liberty, smaller government, but make sure it's efficient. We do have a role for government. But it has to be efficient with taxpayer dollars and really serve people. And people need to be served. Mr. Raffinsberg, I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Be well. Take care. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garpes of Toonyards, with additional music by Jared Paul.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman. With guidance from Emily Boutin, and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccate. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.