The NPR Politics Podcast - The Republican Election Official Who Stood Up To Trump

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Brad Raffensperger is a conservative Republican who serves as Georgia's elected Secretary of State — he oversaw the 2020 elections cycle in the state. In a conversation about his new book Integrity Counts, he tells NPR's Miles Parks and Georgia Public Broadcast's Stephen Fowler about resisting former president Trump's push to corrupt the election results.This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, voting reporter Miles Parks, and GPB reporter Stephen Fowler.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Myles Parks. I cover voting. And today on the show, we've got a special episode. We're talking about one man who became the face of free and fair elections last year, Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia. You all probably remember hearing his name frequently during the 2020 presidential election. He was the man in charge of frequently during the 2020 presidential election. He was the man in charge of making sure the state's election happened without a glitch. But Miles, let's be real.

The Secretary of State of Georgia is not really a high-profile national job. But Raffensperger gained notoriety, it seems, kind of by accident. Yeah, he did. And I think what's really interesting when you look at his political career and like zoom out a little bit, this is a guy who didn't enter politics until he was in his mid 50s. He runs for office and then he has one of the most conservative records in the Georgia House when he's in that body of government, becomes secretary of state. And now he's in this weird position where this bona fide Republican in the Georgia House is now having his Republican credentials kind of take it from him. He's considered like a traitor for going against President Trump in this now very famous phone call that happened last January, where President Trump calls him and basically says there has been all of this election fraud. Here is all of these numbers.

You know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam. And because of what you've done to the president, a lot of people aren't going out to vote. And a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president. And then Raffensperger in this what has now become the most famous moment of election officials standing up for democracy basically tells the president who is in his own party that, no, you are incorrect. This election was fair and free and you lost. Raffensperger has a new book out, which includes details all about that moment. It's called Integrity Counts. And Miles, you and Stephen Fowler of Georgia Public Broadcasting recently spoke with him about it.

I'm sure the very first place you started was with that phone call. Exactly. You have to start there, right? And I mean, I asked Raffensperger, you know, you're on the phone with the president of the United States, and he's telling you people are laughing at you behind your back. He's listing off all of these numbers. Talk me through what's going through your mind. All of his numbers were wrong. That's really what it went through. So I want to just be very specific, calm, factual, respectful, and explain that the number that he just shared,

for example, 5,000 or 10,000 dead people that voted. At that time, we had two. Now we've found two more. So we're still less than a handful of dead people that voted in Georgia. He talked about underage voting. People said there was over 50,000. We actually had 66,000, they said. And there were zero. And they talked about felon voting.

They said there were thousands of felons that voted and there's less than 74. It was things like that, just responding calmly and factually to everything he said. Do you feel like President Trump, as in that call, or he's kind of listing this nonstop list of whether conspiracy theories, numbers that are not true, did you get the feeling that he believes everything he's saying in those moments to you? Or do you feel like these are just ways that he's trying to politically gain a step forward? At the time, I didn't know whether he believed that hook, line, and sinker, or he felt it was expedient to say what that, and he didn't believe it. But since then, now several books have come out from people near and close up to the Washington establishment have come out and said very early on, his advisors told him that they lost the election. And so obviously, I think he knows in his heart that he lost this election.

So you open the book by saying you don't expect history to remember the name Brad Raffensperger. But you've become a bit of a household name in conversations about democracy and America and elections and voting and received a lot of attention, good and bad, from all over the country. Can you talk a little bit about what it's been like to have people from all over the country knowing who you are and paying attention to the office of the Secretary of State and sending you letters of encouragement, but also letters of vitriol. Well, obviously, the letters of encouragement have just been really very warmly received. And I had this lady that sent a letter from California, and she said,

we are Goldwater Republicans. So they were in this fight a long before, you know, Ronald Reagan came along later. And they just understood that I was standing for the rule of law. So they were in this fight a long before, you know, Ronald Reagan came along later, and they just understood that I was standing for the rule of law, and they valued that. I understand that Democrats, they may like me, but when it comes from your own side, you say, the Republican Party has a solid base of people that, yes, we're disappointed in the results, but we have to understand that if we have intellectual honesty, we accept them and move on. And then we say, how do we build that coalition? How do we build that big, wide coalition that Reagan built? And so I think that's really what our party is right now working on is expanding

and having an attractive vision. So I think that the more that we are truthful and the more that we hold other people accountable, And likewise, I've been holding Stacey Abrams accountable for her election lie. I don't want to sound like when you're a little middle schooler, you say they started it first, but she did start this back in 2018. When I took office, we inherited about nine election lawsuits. We won every one of them. She just scored on minor points, but she said that she would have won if it were not for election suppression or voter suppression. Last year, it was talked about voter fraud. Both of those undermine election confidence.

And that's not healthy for America. But Stacey Abrams did go to the courts and push for election law changes. But when all of those were unsuccessful, she acknowledged she would not be the governor of Georgia. Her supporters did not storm the state capitol buildings, send death threats to election officials, or give up on the process and just not vote. You do see there is a difference between what Stacey Abrams did and what Donald Trump did, right?

What I do see is that, obviously, the office of president, it's the highest office. We only have one president, and it's a big office. We have 50 governors, very important offices also. So I understand the order of magnitude. But right now we have the election going on in the state of Virginia, and you have former Governor Terry McAuliffe talking about how she would have won if it were not for voter suppression.

So he's leaning into that lie. Many leaders have talked about that. President Biden has and other people such as Hillary Clinton. And Stacey Abrams last week said that something about she wasn't, it was a convoluted statement, but really she was implying that she did win, but she didn't win. And so you still, we can't let her off and just say, well, it wasn't as high office as the president's office. We need to hold people accountable for what they say and what they do.

And so that's really what my purpose of my book is to point out that if we want to move America forward, we need to cut out some of the vitriol. We need to have basic honesty, common decency, and integrity. All right. That was Stephen Fowler of Georgia Public Broadcasting and our own Miles Parks here at NPR Politics speaking with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. We'll have more of their conversation in a moment when we get back.

And we're back. Raffensperger is a Republican and one who is openly critical of former President Donald Trump. And time and again, we've seen Republicans who have been outspoken against Trump lose the wind in their political sails. So, Miles, did you all ask him about what it's like to be a Republican in this moment who dares to publicly stand up to the former president? Yeah, I mean, that to me was the biggest question on my mind. Raffensperger is running for reelection in 2022, and he's got a Republican primary from a Republican who is pushing when Raffensperger is running for re-election, or in 2024 when the majority of Republican voters right now believe that the election was stolen?

How does that work? I'm going to stand on the truth, and I think that I've shown that I can stand in the gap. I will calmly and factually talk about the benefits of SB 202. For those of you listening, SB 202 was this bill passed earlier this year in Georgia, very controversial, very expansive election bill that changed a lot of different aspects of election law in Georgia. People are surprised that I would support SB 202 for some reason because I stood up to President Trump. But SB 202 moves us away from signature match. And we've been sued by both the Republican Party

and the Democrat Party on signature match, saying that it was a subjective criteria. I said when I ran in 2018, that we need to move to photo ID for all three forms of voting. And now we've done that. We're using driver's license number and birth date, day, month, year.

That is great policy. And so I will stand for solid election reforms. I'll stand for the truth. And I'll stand on my integrity. But I want to jump in on Senate Bill 202. It's a 98-page law that changes just about every aspect of voting in Georgia, including some of the things that you have been against. I mean, Republicans in the state removed you as

chair of the state election board in retaliation for what you said about the election. It's also a massive voting bill, kind of like what Democrats are proposing at the federal level, which you oppose. How is that different? One party that has power rewriting the rules of the election to address things that they see need fixing? Well, first of all, let's unpack the absentee ballot change. Minnesota's been using driver's license number for how many years now? 11 years. And they like it. And no one's ever complained about it there. Texas has followed our model and they'll be using driver's license also. All three states, plus other states that are using it, recognize that it's an objective

criteria. That's a good measure. There were a lot of conversations about reducing the number of days of early voting, but what ended up getting passed was actually 17 days of mandated early voting for all 159 counties. First time ever. So we actually expanded it by one day. And then any county that wants to have Sunday voting can have two days of Sunday voting. That's a good thing.

We also now have put in state law for the very first time that lines have to be less than one hour. Last year in November, every polling location that we had on our leaderboard was under one hour and the average wait time was three minutes. The counties have done a great job. We just want to keep that accountability measure in there going forward that you'll keep lines less than one hour. That's so customers, which are the voters, have a great experience during election day.

So I think that's a good thing. You make the point that for the first time ever the Secretary of State won't be the chair of that. Well, that's probably some retribution and blame shifting on the part of the General Assembly and other leaders, because the state party didn't get the job done. But all the other parts of the bill are solid election reform to improve the process for election workers. In Georgia and other states, we've seen a number of election officials and poll workers quit after working long hours, facing harassment,

death threats. In the book, you detail some of the threats and harassment that your family faced. It's a difficult environment for people to work in voting and work in elections. I mean, I can't imagine somebody looking at 2020 and being like, yeah, you know what? I want to do that. I want to have people show up to my house unannounced, or I want to have people attack me and harass me. Are you worried about the future of American democracy? The public discourse, the vitriol needs to end and it doesn't need to be directed towards poll workers. Here it is. I know they get paid, but it's virtually a volunteer operation. You look at the hours. We have seven to seven, so you have to be there by 6 a.m. and then you're there till

nine o'clock at night and it's just go, go, go all day long. And then you add in there that here you could have someone that's typically over 60. Our average age before COVID was 73, 74 years old. It's a little bit lower, but generally it's people that have a bit more time on their hand because they might be stepped out of their business career and they're not raising kids so they can give back to their community. I think we really need to appreciate our poll workers. And I think that gets back to each of us may have to make an individual decision. Rage and anger doesn't win anyone to our cause, but a happy warrior spirit does.

And I know that Ronald Reagan had it. We see that with other people. But we can lean back to whoever former president as a Republican is your favorite person and is trying to emulate their character. Lincoln, Grant, Teddy, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan. And so there's lots of character, you know, in that long history that we have. Decide who you like, but emulate them. We all need to really look up so we can move forward. That's an awfully optimistic tone to end on, that rage and anger

doesn't motivate anybody to your cause, because I'll be candid, covering the last few elections, I think rage and anger is an awfully successful motivating tactic for candidates. You know, that being said, though, Miles, we know there were lots of poll workers and election officials who were targeted after Trump said the election was stolen from him. Have those tensions died down over the past year? Or do you think that people like Raffensperger will only become more front and center, say, in 2022, 2024, in a deeply polarized country. I've seen no evidence that this is not just the new normal for elections going forward. You know, I just got off the phone this morning with a former election worker who now

consults with states and localities to help them implement vote-by-mail systems, and she was telling me about the messages she's received in the last year. Pictures of nooses, pictures of her children saying, what would it be like if they grew up without a mom? Like, these are the real things that these people who are just normal people within our communities are dealing with just for being associated with elections. And then, you know, just in the last couple of weeks, Virginia has been running an election. And I listened in to some of the trainings that Republicans were doing, poll watcher trainings, and hearing in the Q&A portions of those trainings the kinds of thoughts that people are having about election officials. These conspiracy theorizing about the motivations of election officials. You know, there is so much tension still, and I just have trouble believing that is going to dissipate and not, you know, become

greater in the next couple of years. All right. Well, before we wrap, I just want to say a huge thank you to Stephen Fowler of Georgia Public Broadcasting. He's not here right now, but his reporting in this podcast, his reporting and context insights from Georgia over these past few years on elections, we've really appreciated all of it. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.