A top GOP election official just slapped down Trump’s big lie

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, State of Georgia, and his wife Tricia Raffensperger (Photo by Patrick Farrell/Knight Foundation/Wikimedia Commons)

On Monday, the leading Republican state official in charge of Georgia’s elections rejected false claims by President Donald Trump that aimed to sow doubt about the integrity of vote-counting in the state. With early voting in the midterms already in full swing, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger assured Bloomberg that the state’s election results will be in by midnight on Election Day, declaring the process “free, fair and fast.” Despite Trump's frequent attempts to cast aspersions on voting integrity, Raffensperger asserted, “We are very confident that at the end of the day you can trust the results."

His comments follow a Trump rally in Georgia last Friday, in which the president once again repeated claims that the 2020 election had been "rigged" against him. What's more, he declared that Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA), who is running for reelection, was never legitimately elected in the first place. Trump made these repeatedly debunked claims while campaigning for Republican Representative Mike Collins, who Bloomberg notes is trailing Ossoff in the polls, and GOP gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson, who holds a slight lead over Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms. According to Bloomberg, "Trump’s comments followed a request by the director of the GOP-controlled State Election Board to the Trump administration to intervene in the Georgia election to ensure fairness. That request, which has so far been met with silence from federal officials, stoked worries that Trump would attempt to intervene in Georgia to sway the result." Raffensperger told the outlet that he has not heard from federal officials about getting involved, and that he doesn't expect the Trump administration to do so. State voter rolls, he noted, have been audited three times and have been rated 99 percent accurate.

In the tumultuous days following the 2020 election result, Trump notoriously pushed Raffensperger to “find” the 11,780 votes he would need to win the state against Joe Biden. Raffensperger denied Trump’s request and maintained that the election had been conducted securely. And as Bloomberg explains of Trump's claims about Ossoff, in the first round of the US Senate election, Ossoff narrowly lost to then-Senator David Perdue, but later won the runoff between the top two candidates. Ossoff just held his largest rally yet, during which he pressed attendees to vote early and in person, referencing a move this year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County as part of an investigation into alleged improprieties. “How foolish of them to come to the cradle of the civil rights movement to spread those lies and seize those ballots,” Ossoff told a crowd of about 1,500 people before a giant banner that read “Georgia Votes Early."

Raffensperger told Bloomberg that while he hasn't heard anything from the FBI about the supposed Fulton County investigation, voters are taking Ossoff's advice. According to Raffensperger, as of noon on Monday, 900,000 people had voted early — a 9 percent increase compared to 2022.

From Your Site Articles