Republican top Georgia elections officer says voting integrity lies hurt his party

Georgia’s top elections official says he believes Republicans’ claims of doubting the integrity of the vote in November’s presidential election “will really hurt” their party’s chances at the poll.

In an interview on Sunday with NewsNation, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, defended the election process he oversees amid the casting of a record number of early votes in recent days. His comments came after the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Raffensperger’s fellow Republican, posted claims on X that a voting machine had misprinted a voter’s selections to the detriment of her party.

Raffensperger, who took office in 2019, said that “spreading stories like that” will “really hurt our turnout on our side”.

“I’m a conservative Republican, so I don’t know why they do that, it’s self-defeating,” Raffensperger added. “You know, you can trust the results.”

Georgia, a battleground state, has been a central focus for Republicans in their unfounded claims of voter fraud. During the 2020 election, after Joe Biden won Georgia by a close margin and took the presidency from Donald Trump, Raffensperger announced a ballot recount. That recount confirmed that Biden had won the election.

Ever since, legal and political showdowns have placed the state as a central focus for Trump’s attempt to return to the White House in a contest against the vice-president, Kamala Harris.

Recent court rulings in Georgia have pushed back on Republican-led attempts to change how the state handles its elections.

The Georgia state election board, a relatively obscure five-person panel primarily made up of Trump-aligned Republicans, passed a number of rules that would significantly change how the state handles its political races. The most controversial proposal sought to obligate poll workers to hand-count paper ballots on election night.

Nonetheless, Georgia judges ruled against implementing those changes after Raffensperger warned they could lead to disrupting the certification of the election, confusion and delays. Georgia’s Republican party has appealed.

More than 1 million voters have already cast their ballots in Georgia, cementing its status as a swing state in the race between Harris and Trump.

After the 2020 elections, Trump-aligned Republicans lied that their candidate lost to Biden because of voter fraud. Fervor over those lies culminated in Trump supporters’ attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Raffensperger at one point received a phone call directly from Trump pressuring him to “find” him enough votes to prevent Biden from winning Georgia, though the secretary of state rebuffed him.

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Georgia state prosecutors later filed criminal charges against Trump over his attempts to overturn the outcome of the presidential election there, all of which are part of the many legal problems that the former president has been confronting while running for the White House again.

In an interview with the New York Times earlier in October, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, refused to answer whether the former president lost the 2020 election. Vance later clarified that he did not think Trump lost the 2020 race, saying: “So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use.”

Raffensperger on Sunday maintained Georgia was “ranked number one” for election integrity by organizations on both sides of the political spectrum.

“That just shows you we’re doing the right thing,” Raffensperger said. “Voters trust the process we have in Georgia. It’s easy to vote. It’s hard to cheat.”