Brad Raffensperger is an American businessman, civil engineer and politician who served as Secretary of State in Georgia since 2019 He was member of the Republican Party and previously served as a Republican representative in in the Georgia House of Representatives for District 50.

He became famous around the world when President Donald Trump had lost the election to Joe Biden but could not bear the thought of giving up the presidency. As a result, Trump repeatedly made false claims about election fraud on the part of the Democrats and their allies and launched an unsuccessful campaign to overturn election results in many states.  He launched more than 60 suits and all but one were lost except for a very minor one that really had little significance.

As part of this campaign, Trump harassed Raffensperger with numerous telephone calls until he finally agreed to talk to the President on the telephone on January 2, 2021 less than a month before the inauguration. Fortunately, he took precautions and recorded the conversation. In that call, sounding like a Mafia Don, President Don tried to get Raffensperger to change the election results by finding more votes for him than had been counted. This is what he said in that telephone call: “”What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” He never won the race of course as his own Republican election officials showed him over and over again. His own Attorney General, Bill Barr also confirmed this.

Heroically, Raffensperger refused to do so, and said the outgoing president’s claims were based on falsehoods.

First, the Trump team was obviously desperate to have that telephone conversation. In all 18 telephone calls and texts made by the president’s office to Raffensperger were made  including from himself and his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. They wanted to talk to Raffensperger badly. And finally, on January 2, 2020, 4 days before the events of January 6^th they got that call. As Schiff said, “they were quite persistent.”

Next, president Trump kept pushing the false claim that he had won the state of Georgia, which the election officials had carefully and methodically determined was just not true. None of them had ever received the evidence to the contrary that Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani had promised. That evidence never did come.

Trump then menacingly reminded Raffensperger that the people of Georgia were angry because he had won by hundreds of thousands of votes. Of course, they were angry not because Trump had those votes, but because Trump was able to persuade his followers, without any evidence, that this false claim was true. It was not true. The reminder though was important. It was a subtle way of telling Raffensperger that he was in a dangerous position. The previous year had shown many examples of what happened when Trump unleashed his followers onto state officials for failing to believe his lies. The Governor of Michigan was nearly kidnapped by a pack of deadly Trumpsters. In Arizona and Georgia and other places those brave election officials were threatened with death. Taking the ethically right position as Raffensperger had done was either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. Raffensperger was not stupid. He was a brave an honourable man; everything the president was not.

Trump had told a state of Georgia official, Miss Frances Watson, that she would be praised if she found the right answer. Secretary of State Raffensperger stated Trump did not win by hundreds of thousands of votes. He didn’t win at all.

Trump was engaged in pure intimidation And intimidation from the most powerful man in the world is a very big deal. The rest of us can only guess how hard it would be to resist such intimidation. Yet it is still shocking to me that some honourable state officials, many of them Republicans, had the courage to resist such pressure. The president of the United States said to Frances Watson that he would be very grateful for “whatever you can do.” This is how Mafia dons work. President Dons should do better. We expect more from presidents.

When Trump spoke to Raffensperger the election in Georgia had already been certified and Trump had been told repeatedly by Georgia and federal officials that his claims of voter fraud were entirely unsubstantiated and that his conspiracy theories about voter fraud in Georgia were bogus. Yet Trump persisted in pressuring Raffensperger to find the votes he needed to win despite the lack of evidence of voter fraud. That call lasted 67 minutes.

Even though the conspiracy theory of suitcases of ballots had been dismissed by Gabriel Sterling and William Barr, Trump insisted on bringing them up again. Trump said, “the minimum it was, was 18,000 ballots. All for Biden.” Trump did not explain how he purported to know they were all for Biden. There were no such illegal ballots in any event, but how did Trump or his team know the votes were all for Biden?

Over and over again, Trump thinks that just because he says something it must be true. That is the classic stance of the bully. I can’t possibly be wrong. Don’t ask for evidence. Just believe me because I said it.

These were allegations that the Department of Justice, the Attorney General, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the office of the Secretary of State for Georgia, which Raffensperger headed, had dismissed as false and Trump knew they had rejected his claims about them.

Raffensperger confirmed that all these bodies had declared them false. As he said,

“Even more importantly, when Bjay Pak resigned as US Attorney of the northern district of Georgia, Trump appointed as acting District Attorney of the northern district , Bobby Christine. And Bobby Christine looked at that he was quoted in the AJC that he found nothing. And he dismissed that case…”

Again his own appointees found no fraud.

Yet Trump believed, as a bully would believe, that even though all these officials dismissed the conspiracy theory Trump promulgated, that he expected Raffensperger to act on the basis of it in the face of all these dismissals merely because Trump said Raffensperger should do that, even though neither Trump nor Giuliani ever provided any evidence for their claims. When the Mafia Don speaks, he expects everyone else to believe him no matter who has debunked the claim and no matter how little evidence there is to support his claims.

Gabriel Sterling confirmed that there were not suitcases of illegal ballots as Trump constantly alleged, “they were standard ballot carriers that allow seals to be put on them so they are tamper proof.” There was nothing shady or nefarious about them contrary to what  Trump and Giuliani continued to suggest. The ballots were exactly where they belonged in tamper proof carriers. A monitor from the Department of Justice counted how many votes had been counted on each machine and made a note about that.

In the telephone call Trump said, “They dropped a lot of votes in there late at night, you know that Brad.’ Because Trump  said so it must be true, right? Wrong. This was not true. As Raffensperger said at the hearing,

“No, I believe the president was referring to some of the counties when they would upload the ballots all had been accepted. They had to be accepted by state law by 7 p.m. So there were no additional ballots accepted after 7 p.m.”

Once again, the president was not telling the truth on the telephone call. The statements Trump had been making to the contrary over and over again on social media and other media were not true. But these lies were travelling fast, as lies often do. Many people believed the lies because the president told them.

On that telephone call with Raffensperger, Trump also brought the second conspiracy theory:

“So dead people voted. And the number is close to 5,000 people. They went to obituaries, they went to all sort of methods to come up with an accurate number. And at a minimum that’s close to 5,000 voters.”

At the hearing Raffensperger was asked if they had investigated this second conspiracy as well, and he confirmed that his office had done that. As Raffensperger said,

“That is not accurate. Actually, in their law suit they alleged 10,315 dead people voted. We found 2 dead people who had voted when we reported on January 6^th. Subsequent to that we found 2 more. That is 1, 2, 3, 4 not 4000, a total of 4. Not 10,000 not 5,000.”

So in Georgia  the Trump legal team missed the mark by 10, 311 votes.

At the Select House Committee hearings,  Gabriel Sterling, the Chief Operating Officer, at the Secretary of State’s Office in Georgia described how Trump’s legal team misled the American public about video tapes he had seen and they saw about the carriers that had been packed into carriers in plain view of everyone. As Sterling said,

“what is really frustrating is the president and his attorneys had this same video tape. They saw the exact same things the rest of us could see and they chose to mislead state Senators and the public about what was on that video….it [their mischaracterization] was obviously untrue, they knew it was untrue and they continued to do things like this”.

Of course, Sterling was a lonely voice in Georgia competing against what Schiff called the huge megaphone of the president of the United States who used it to spread massive amounts of misinformation. Trying to counter the misinformation, Sterling testified, “was like a shovel trying to empty the ocean.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a long time Republican,  was not famous before the presidential election of 2020. He is famous now. That is all thanks to president Donald Trump and his slightly more than an hour long telephone call with him where the president tried to strong arm Raffensperger to overturn the lawful election by “finding him” about nearly 12,000 votes.  As if they could be plucked out of the air.

At the Select Committee Hearing of June 20, 2022 Adam Schiff asked him point blank who won the 2020 presidential election. Raffensperger was in charge of the election and he replied without hesitation,  “Joseph Biden won.” He was also asked if he had voted for Trump and whether he had been a supporter of Trump. He said he had been a supporter and voted for him. Clearly, he was not biased in favour of Biden.

His office conducted a machine recount, a forensic audit and a full hand recount of the election which had been won by Biden by nearly 12,000 votes. That was admittedly a narrow victory. But it was much more than could possibly have been overturned on a recount. Raffensperger confirmed that they literally recounted every one of the 5 million ballots that had been cast. Raffensperger said “the recount came remarkably close to the original count…3 counts all remarkably close and all showing that Trump lost the election.”

That did not stop or even slow down president Trump and his team from making numerous allegations of voter false fraud in Georgia .  Raffensperger and Sterling of course had to address those allegations that Trump and his team were making. That was their job and they performed it. Raffensperger became the spokesperson in response to the false claims by the Trump team that were having an effect on election workers and the general public.

Mr. Sterling told the president directly that he had the right to appeal the decision to the courts, but he bravely said to him,

“you don’t have the ability to say–and you need to step up and say this–stop trying to inspire people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s gonna get hurt; someone’s gonna get shot; someone gonna get killed. And it’s not right.”

That day Sterling said that an official with Dominion Voting Machines had been threatened by some QAnon supporters. These were Trumpsters. Sterling went to Twitter to read the tweet. The tweet to the representative from Dominion said “You’ve committed treason. May God have mercy on your soul.” It showed a twisted noose. And for lack of a better word, Sterling said,  “I lost it. I got irate.” He had seen many such statements on social media of similar character but this one threw him over the edge.

He and his supervisor decided to call Secretary of State Raffensperger and all agreed that they had to make a statement about the rhetoric that had gone too far. Of course, there is no evidence that Trump ever counselled his supporters to avoid violence or violent rhetoric just as he did not at first and for many hours say that on January 6, 2020.

Instead, later that day, Trump tweeted, after he had been told there was no fraud, “There was massive voter fraud in Georgia.” Sterling agreed with Schiff that this was “just plain false.”

The next day on December 2, 2020 president Trump again issued a video where he made false claims about voter fraud in Georgia: “They found thousands and thousands of votes that were out of whack. All against me.”  That was not only false, it was incendiary. He was pouring fuel on a fire in Georgia, where emotions were running high among Trump supporters who were being told the election had been stolen by the Democrats.

As Adam Schiff told the hearing, 2 days after Sterling’s emotional appeal to Trump to stop inciting violence,

“2 representatives of Donald Trump appeared in Georgia, including Rudy Giuliani and launched a new conspiracy theory that would take on a life of its own and threatened the lives of several innocent election workers. This story falsely alleged that some time on election night, election workers at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta Georgia kicked out poll observers. After the poll observers left, the story goes, these workers pulled suitcases of ballots from under a table and ran those ballots counting machines multiple times, completely without evidence. Trump and his allies claimed that these suitcases contained 18,000 ballots all for Joe Biden. None of this was true. Rudy Giuliani appeared before the Georgia State Senate, played a surveillance video from State Farm Arena falsely claiming that it showed this conspiracy taking place.”

Here is a sample of what Mr. Giuliani had to say at that hearing:

“And when you saw what we saw on the video which to me was a smoking gun. A powerful smoking gun. I don’t have to be a genius to figure out what happened. I don’t have to be genius to figure out that those votes are not legitimate votes. You don’t put legitimate votes under a table and wait until you throw the opposition out and in the middle of the night count them. You would have to be fools to think that.”

President Trump’s campaign amplified Mr. Giuliani’s false claims in a tweet pushing out the footage. Mr. Giuliani likewise pushed out his claims on social media. As you can see from his tweet he said, “It is now beyond doubt Fulton County Democrats had stolen the election.” Later in this hearing we will hear from one of these workers about the effect that these lies had on her and her family.

Sterling confirmed that the election officials in his office reviewed the entire 48-hour surveillance tape of the proceedings at State Farm Arena. This was much more than the short excerpt Giuliani showed the Senate Committee.

The conspiracy theorists had conflated a water main brake that did not exist, and other things, but as Sterling said,

“what it actually showed, election workers engaging in normal ballot processing…one of the frustrating things was the so-called suitcase of ballots, from under the table. If you watch the entirety of the video, you saw that these were election workers who were under the impression that they would get to go home at around 10-10:30. People were putting on their coats. People were putting ballots that were prepared to be scanned into ballot carriers that are sealed with a  tamper proof seal so that they are not messed with. It’s an interesting thing because there are 4 screens with the video, and as you are watching this you can see the election monitors with the press as you see these ballot carriers place under the table. You see it…later the official is told they have to keep on counting. You see everybody take their coats off, and pull the ballots out…The secondary thing you see is that a ballot scan goes through and a batch will be taken off and they will be run through again. This is a standard operating procedure. If there is a mis-scan, a misalignment if it doesn’t read right, these are high speed high capacity scanners, so 3 or 4 will go through after  a mis-scan and to delete that batch and put it back through again, and by going through a hand tally as the Secretary pointed out, we showed that there had been multiple ballots scanned without a corresponding physical ballot, your counts would have been a lot higher than the ballots themselves, and with the hand tally we saw that 2 specific numbers had been met. The hand tally got us to a .1053 % of the total votes cast and .009% on the margin which is essentially dead on accurate. Most academic studies will show that between a hand tally you will have between 1% and 2% but because we used ballot marking devices where it’s very clear what the voter intended. It is a lot easier to conduct the hand count and it showed that none of that was true. “

In other words, as Trump’s own Attorney General had said, all the Trump team claims of voter fraud, at least in Georgia were all “bullshit.”

 On December 7, 2020 Gabriel Sterling held a press briefing.  This is part of what he said:

“I am going to move on to what I call “Disinformation Monday.” Many of you saw the video tape of what happened at State Farm Arena. I spent hours with our post certification investigators…I spent hours going over this video to explain to people that what you saw–the “secret suitcase with ‘magic ballots’ which actually were ballots that had been patched into those absentee ballot carriers by the workers in plain view of the monitors and the press. And what’s really frustrating is the president’s attorneys had this same video tape. They saw exactly the same things the rest of us could see, and they chose to mislead state Senators and the public about what was on that video.”

Trump’s own Attorney General William Barr and Bjay Pak from the Department of Justice reviewed the same tapes and came to exactly the same conclusion as the Georgia Republicans had done. And that was that the Trump team allegations were bogus. Now we all know how rare such agreement is in the United States where Republicans and Democrats can rarely agree on what day it is, but they actually agreed that Trump and his legal team were not telling the truth about that video. Barr said, “We took a hard look at this ourselves and …The Fulton Country allegations had no merit.”

Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donohue specifically told Trump that his allegations were false. Donoghue said “He kept fixating on the suitcases which presumably had fraudulent ballots and the suitcase that had been rolled out from under the table and I told him, ‘No sir there are no suitcases. You can watch the video over and over again. There is no suitcase. There was a wheeled bin where they kept ballots.”

As Adam Schiff  the Democratic Congressman summed up a the Hearing:

“No matter how often senior Department of Justice officials including his own Attorney General told the president these allegations were not true, president Trump kept promoting these lies and putting pressure on state officials to accept them.” 

Yet 4 years later Trump continues to spew the same lies about a stolen election in Georgia, even though at the Hearings Trump’s own people exposed his lies.

A federal conservative judge, Judge David O. Carter, of the California District Court, Central District of California, evaluated the facts and said this about the effort of Trump and Eastman to get around the constitution: President Trump’s efforts to pressure Mike Pence to act illegally by refusing to count electoral votes likely violated 2 Federal criminal statutes and also said this:

“If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.’

As Elizabeth Cheney said, “Every American should read what this federal judge has written.” The same judge, David Carter, issued another decision the week of the Capitol Assault hearings in Washington, where he said John Eastman and other Trump lawyers knew they had little chance of being successful with their legal arguments in court, but they relied on those arguments anyway “to overturn a democratic election.”

Later Eastman realized that what he had done might get him in trouble with the law and advised Giuliani that perhaps he should get a pardon, proving that he too was at home in the swamp that Trump claimed to be draining.

Congresswoman Lofgren of the Select Committee  said this  at the hearing:

“Over and over judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans alike, directly refuted his false narrative [Trump’s false narrative] They called out the Trump campaigns lack of evidence for his claims, even in cases where they could have simply thrown out the lawsuits without writing a word.”

As Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren pointed out, the lack of evidence in the Trump cases was criticized by judges across the political spectrum. In Pennsylvania a Trump appointed judge concluded,

Charges required specific allegations and proof. We have neither here. Another Trump appointed judge warned that if cases like these succeeded ‘any disappointed loser in a presidential election able to hire a team of clever lawyers could flag claimed deviations from election results and cast doubt on election results.’ The list goes on and on…The rejection of Trump’s litigation efforts was overwhelming:

“22 federal judges appointed by Republican presidents including 10 appointed by president Trump himself and at least 24 elected or appointed Republican state judges dismissed the president’s claim. At least 11 lawyers have been referred to disciplinary proceedings for bad faith baseless efforts to undermine the 2020 presidential election. Rudy Giuliani had his license to practice law suspended in New York and just this week a newly filed complaint will potentially make his suspension to practice law permanent.”

Here are some samples of some actual statements made by the judges in those 62 cases:

“Sheer unreliability of the information”

“speculative accusations”

“harm the public in countless ways”

“breed confusion, undermine the public’s trust in elections”

“Plaintiff’s claims fail on the merits”

“mere speculation by plaintiffs”

“unsupported by the evidence”

“derived from wholly unreliable sources”

“reach implausible conclusions’

“This court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits”

“Plaintiff’s interpretation of events is incorrect and not even credible”

“rife with speculation and guess-work about sinister motives”

“did not prove by any standard of proof that any illegal votes were cast”

“charges required specific allegations and proof. We have neither here.”

“strained legal arguments without merit”

“hazy and nebulous inference”

“nothing but speculation and conjecture”

“an amalgamation of theories, conjectures, and speculation”

“public sphere of gossip and innuendo”

“largely based on anonymous witnesses, hearsay, and irrelevant analysis’

“allegations are sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence”

“fundamental and obvious misreading of the Constitution”

 

Clearly the judges wanted to express their displeasure with the Trump campaign’s frivolous charges.  As Republican lawyer Ben Ginsburg said “The Trump campaigns unprecedented efforts to overturn its election laws in court was deeply damaging abuse of the judicial process.”

Perhaps Justice David Carter of the US District Court said it best: “This is a coup in search of a legal theory.” He also added, there was evidence that Trump “more likely than not” committed felony crimes.

Again it is clear, the American judiciary, whether appointed by Republicans or Democrats could not stomach Trump’s lies about a stolen election.  And they listened to legal arguments and weighed the evidence. Republican who continue to believe the lies have done neither.

In the American system of law, not unlike Canada’s, the courts have the final say about challenges to election integrity. Candidates have the right to challenge official votes. The Trump campaign made dozens of such court challenges.

The Select Committee heard from a renowned legal expert Ben Ginsberg who had represented Republican George W. Bush in successfully resisting the challenge of his election for president by Al Gore that went to the US Supreme Court and led to the election of Bush. Ginsburg had represented numerous other Republicans in election litigation. He served as the national counsel to Republican presidential campaigns of 2000, 2004, and 2012.  He also represented George W. Bush in the most famous election case in America and won.

As Ms Lofgren of the Select Committee said, “it is fair to say that you are the most prominent Republican lawyer who has litigated elections.” Ginsburg had analyzed the Trump’s litigation. He pointed out to the House Select committee how the Trump campaign had major legal problems in pursuing their legal cases. The elections were not close. The narrowest margin was more than 10,000 votes. In 2000 there had been 500 votes apart. As he said, “you just don’t make up those sorts of numbers in recounts.”  He also pointed out how the Trump campaign did not have evidence to support their claims. After all, courts always demand evidence. That is just what they do. Unlike the American public who are often swayed by wild allegations without supporting evidence, American courts are much more circumspect.

Ginsburg said there was not one case in which an American court found a Trump allegation was proved. “There was never that instance. The simple fact is that the Trump campaign did not make its case.”

He looked at more than 60 cases with more than a 180 counts. Not one was made out in court!

 The House of Representatives Select Committee found that after the election and before January 6^th, the Trump campaign brought 62 cases to court and it lost 61. The 1 case they “won” did not actually affect the outcome of that election. The Trump campaign said the courts did not give them an opportunity to make their cases in court.  Ginsburg denied this. As Ginsburg said,

“They did have their day in court. About half of those cases were dismissed at the procedural stage.  For lack of standing, the proper people didn’t bring the case, or there wasn’t sufficient evidence and it got dismissed on a motion to dismiss. But in the others, there were discussions of the merits of cases made in the complaints. In no instances did the court find that the charges of fraud were real.”

It is also worth noting that even if the Trump campaign complained that it did not have its day in court, there were post election reviews in each of the 6 battleground states that could have made a difference, and those cases ranged from the somewhat farcical Cyber Ninjas case in Arizona, to the Michigan  Senate report to the hand recount case in Georgia that Mr. Pak addressed, in each of those instances there was no credible evidence of fraud produced by the Trump campaign or his supporters. 

In other words, Bill Barr was right. All of Trump’s claims of fraudulent elections were bullshit. Yet for 4 years since then Trump and the Trumpsters have been trying to use claims of a stolen election to persuade their fellow Republicans that Biden was not legitimately elected. Surprisingly, many of those Republicans support the former President on these issues. But the claims are all bullshit.

Trump and the Trumpsters are simply out of touch with reality.