Days after former President Donald Trump accused top Georgia officials of concealing election fraud, the secretary of state said the allegations of irregularities in DeKalb County were already under investigation. However, he slammed Trump’s continued focus on an election he lost.
“What bothers me, and it really should bother everyone, after 10 months since the last ballots were counted, we’re still dealing with this misinformation and disinformation surrounding the elections,” Brad Raffensperger told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
In his letter to Raffensperger last week, Trump alleged that 43,000 absentee ballots had been counted despite violations of chain of custody rules, or rules requiring specific documentation of every step in the process from the time an absentee ballot is submitted.
GEORGIA JUDGE ASKS 2020 ELECTION INVESTIGATORS FOR FINDINGS ON FRAUDULENT BALLOTS
Raffensperger said his office opened an investigation into DeKalb County’s handling of ballots roughly three weeks ago when “some information came to us that there was a question about chain of custody.”
But even those questions wouldn’t invalidate the ballots from that area, Raffensperger said. He noted absentee ballots in the 2020 election were checked through signature matching, meaning each ballot was traced back to the individual voters’ absentee ballot request to verify authenticity.
Georgia moved away from signature matching with an election law passed earlier this year. In future elections, officials will verify absentee ballots using driver’s license or Social Security numbers rather than voters’ signatures.
Raffensperger’s office announced in June it would investigate similar allegations of missing chain of custody documents in Fulton County, a place with a history of election administration issues. In that county, public records request from a local paper revealed that several documents recording the times that ballots were moved from drop boxes had gone missing.
Trump is likely to continue focusing on unfounded claims about Georgia’s vote-counting when he returns to the Peach State on Saturday for his first post-presidency rally, during which he is expected to promote several statewide candidates for office. One of them, GOP Rep. Jody Hice, is challenging Raffensperger for his seat.
Another candidate he’s expected to endorse, former football star Herschel Walker, is vying to replace Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock next November.
“He’s going to come, and he’s going to say what he’s going to say, but he knows in his heart that he lost the election,” Raffensperger said.
“He’s continued to promote the big lie, and then he’s also fundraising off this issue just like Stacey Abrams has,” Raffensperger added, referring to the failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate who, after her defeat in 2018, refused to concede to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp due to unfounded claims of voter suppression.
Although Trump has leveled unproven accusations of voter fraud at jurisdictions across the country, he has reserved a particular ire for Georgia. Trump railed against Raffensperger and Kemp both publicly and privately in the weeks after the 2020 election. He has since continued to accuse Georgia officials of failing to unearth the cheating he claims cost him the state.
Raffensperger noted Georgia has conducted multiple recounts, audits, and investigations of ballots cast across the state and found no evidence of fraud or even widespread administrative errors. In his forthcoming book, Integrity Counts, Raffensperger said he lays out the results of each election probe in detail.
“Every time we’ve looked into all of these and all of these concerns, it’s clear that Donald Trump lost the election fair and square,” Raffensperger said.
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Still, given Trump’s enormous following and much larger platform, Raffensperger said his office does not plan to rebut any claims about the election that Trump makes on Saturday directly.
“We are not going to win that bullhorn argument,” Raffensperger said.
