Fresh off his June 28 interview with federal investigators about former President Donald Trump’s alleged interference in the 2020 election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger told members of the Perimeter Chamber that the upcoming 2024 presidential election may be deja-vu all over again.
However, he emphasized at the June 29 event at Bar Peri at the AC Hotel in Dunwoody, “honest and fair” election policies and procedures will not be the reason for any chaos that ensues in Georgia.
“We have the cleanest voter records in the United States, and our job is to make sure that we have an honest and fair election,” Raffensberger said. “We may have the same situation in 2024 (with accusations of voter fraud), but I have confidence in what we have in place in Georgia.”
Raffensberger, who was first elected secretary of state in 2018 and overwhelmingly re-elected in 2022 after defeating a Trump-backed candidate in the Republican primary, was pushed into the national spotlight after a phone call between his office and Trump in January 2021 was released to the public. In an hour-long conversation, Trump asked Raffensberger to “find” 11,780 votes, one more than President Joe Biden, who won the state by 11,779 votes.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump can be heard saying on the audio recording of the call. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
That conversation, and other alleged attempts by Trump and his team to influence the election’s outcome, has resulted in sweeping investigations on a number of fronts, including an expansive probe by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
Raffensberger, while not mentioning Trump by name, said “false narratives” espoused by the former president and his supporters put doubt into the voting process.
“People were looking for excuses for why they didn’t win, and the real answer is that they got fewer votes,” he said. “I would hope that the people of Georgia would trust the process and know that we will run an honest and fair election.”
The secretary of state said one such narrative circulated in Georgia – that 10,000 dead people had voted in the presidential election – was wildly inaccurate.
“We actually found that the number was four people, not 4,000, just four,” he told the attendees. “Also, we did a hand recount of the five million votes in the election and found that the results were virtually the same.”
Special Counsel Jack Smith has been investigating whether there was any illegal interference in the transfer of power after the 2020 election or certification of the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, 2021. Smith is also leading the investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office. Raffensberger declined to divulge any details about the June 28 meeting when asked about it during the Chamber event, other than to say, “It was “an interesting day.”
Raffensberger had also testified before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He and his family received multiple death threats for months after his appearance and at one point went into hiding after members of the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers were found outside his home.
In an interview with Rough Draft after the Chamber event, when asked about how he was handling the unwanted notoriety and vitriol, Raffensberger downplayed it, calling it “an interesting phenomenon.”
“We went through the storm, and we prevailed,” he said. “It just shows you how good the people of Georgia are.”
