Raffensperger knocks 'double-minded' Trump-endorsed challenger

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Sunday rebuked Rep. Jody Hice (Ga.), his challenger in the upcoming GOP primary, as being "double-minded" when it comes to the most recent national elections.

"The person I'm running against, Congressman Hice, he's been in Congress for several years. He's never done a single piece of election reform legislation. Then he certified his own race with those same machines, the same ballots, and yet for President Trump, he said you couldn't trust that," Raffensperger said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"That's a double-minded person, and as a pastor, he should know better. So I'm going to run on integrity, and I'm going to run on the truth. I don't know what he's going to run on," he added.

Raffensperger drew the ire of former President Trump after the 2020 presidential election due to his refusal to overturn the results of the election in favor of Trump. During a phone call in January, Trump threatened Raffensperger and said he wanted him to "find 11,780 votes," the minimum number needed to change the outcome.

Despite winning reelection in 2020, Hice was among the GOP House lawmakers who voted against certifying President Biden's victory in Georgia.

The guardian.com

Brad Raffensperger: ‘I haven’t talked to Trump. I don’t expect that’ll happen’

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger discusses his new book, “Integrity Counts,” during an interview on Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021, in Atlanta. In the book, Raffenseperger speaks out against former President Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. (AP Photo/Ron Harris)

Brad Raffensperger: ‘People have to decide individually and corporately what they want our country to look like.’ Photograph: Ron Harris/AP
Georgia’s top election official was pressured by Trump to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory. What does he think about it now?

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top election official, was sitting at his kitchen counter with his wife, Tricia, in early January, his cell phone on a metal stand so he could take notes. On the other line was Donald Trump, who had lost Georgia to Joe Biden in November, a result confirmed by multiple recounts.

The president had a blunt and unimaginable request for Raffensperger: find enough votes to flip the results of the election in Georgia.

Raffensperger, a mild-mannered engineer by training, refused to go along with the president’s request, but saw it as a threat, he writes in his new book Integrity Counts.

He and his family have since been subject to a barrage of harassment, including death threats, from Trump and his supporters. Republicans in the Georgia state legislature have stripped him of his role as the chair of the state election board. Now, he’s running for re-election next year in what is expected to be an extremely difficult primary for him, in a field that includes at least one candidate, endorsed by Trump, who tried to overturn the 2020 election results.

The Guardian spoke to Raffensperger about the January phone call with Trump, threats to election officials, and whether he thinks there’s a place in the Republican party today for officials who resist attempts to undermine the 2020 election results.

Have you talked to Trump since that January call? Do you expect to ever talk to him again?

No, I haven’t talked to him, and don’t expect that’ll happen in the future.

Were you scared in the moment of [the phone call]? You have the president of the United States, the leader of your party, in a very heated environment in the days after the election, pressuring you to do something that could affect whether he serves another term. And did you ever doubt yourself in what you were doing?

I wanted to make sure that we had all the facts. That we weren’t missing something. Our team was continuously asked by me: “What about this? What about that?” And so we ran down every single allegation. Then I sent a letter to Congress, it’s a 10-page letter, which I put in the book – they got it on 6 January and I know they were busy with other things. But it really goes through, point by point, every single allegation that was made.

I understand my side is grieving and has difficulty understanding this, but 28,000 people, 28,000 Georgians, did not vote for anyone for president. They skipped that and yet they voted down-ballot. And when I give those three data points to Republicans it starts to really dawn on them, they start to understand that there was [tail-off] at the top of the ticket.

But people are still talking about the ballots that were stuffed in the suitcase and whatever else. People don’t seem to be persuaded by facts.

I think that everyone is best served when they have intellectual honesty. And to get intellectual honesty you have to have intellectual curiosity. That you actually want to uncover the facts and have the courage to actually look into it and maybe have your paradigm shifted and challenged because what you’ve been told has been wrong.

At some point, I know that if I was lied to by all these people, and they know that they’ve been lying to people, I think that they may rise up in anger and really understand that they’ve been played.

Does it worry you to see the Republican party flirting with these claims, and in some cases not disavowing them and even embracing them?

Well, let’s be fair and balanced. It bothers me that both parties are doing that. Because Stacey Abrams was in Virginia less than three weeks ago, and she said “just because you win doesn’t mean you’ve won”. Her narrative of voter suppression has been parroted by many people, from Hillary Clinton to many other notable national figures. (Note: Abrams has strongly repudiated attempts by Raffensperger and others to equate her decision not to concede Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race to Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.)

So it’s actually both sides are guilty of this. And both sides need to pull back, stop, and walk that line of integrity. When you walk that line of integrity, then you can start rebuilding trust.

Are you continuing to get threats?

Every once in a while, now that the book’s out, you get a text or a voicemail. It’s people that really don’t want to know the truth and don’t want to dig into the truth. I understand where they’re coming from. They’re not happy with losing an election. They’re not happy with the direction of the country and they’re not pleased probably with President Biden. There’s a lot that’s happened in the last year under his leadership that is very disappointing and alarming.

Are you concerned about experienced election officials leaving their jobs?

I’m concerned that we have seen in Georgia, probably less than a handful of county election directors leave, retire a little bit early.

And so you hate to see that happen. And you just hope they’ll have a team in place that’ll pick up that mantle and lead with strong leadership.

I wanted to ask you a little bit about the provisions of Georgia’s new election law that dealt with your authority specifically on the state elections board. How concerned are you about efforts to give legislatures in Georgia and elsewhere more control over the bodies like the state elections board and election administration?

I’ve always believed that these boards should be held accountable to the voters.

If you look in Georgia, the state elections board chair has always been an elected position. And so for that reason alone, I don’t believe it was wise. I believe in some point in the future, they’ll regret the decision they made. But it was made with the thought of payback, petty retribution, blame-shifting, to placate people looking for, you know, a head on a platter.

So you’re still very opposed to it?

Well it’s bad policy. I don’t support bad policy.

You’re in a competitive primary with at least one opponent who has voiced serious doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election. How concerned are you that someone could get into power that gets a call from the president or someone else and is willing to go along with the kind of thing that you weren’t willing to go along with in 2020?

I believe that Americans overwhelmingly are good, honest, people. And they’re looking for honest government. And they’re looking for people that will stand in the gap and do the right thing. And I’ve shown that I will make the tough calls to make sure that we follow the constitution, we follow state law.

I talk to Republicans. I talk to a lot of them. And yes I get dog-cussed by a few. But many Republicans support what I did. They’re disappointed in the results. They wish that the president would have won. That runs the whole gamut. But people recognize that when people do what is right, even when it can appear to be difficult, that that is really something that should be modeled and esteemed.

I’m curious what message you think it would send if people didn’t vote for that. If what you did in 2020 wound up costing you the election next year, what message would that send?

Well, people have to decide individually and corporately what they want our country to look like. And I think that Americans, as I said, the vast majority are good, honest, taxpaying, law-abiding Americans. And what they want is people who will make the right decision.

Nationalfile.com
By Patrick Howley, January 4, 2021 at 8:29am

CAUGHT ON TAPE: Brad Raffensperger Spoke Mandarin; Begged For Chinese Votes

Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was placed into office in the Georgia House of Representatives in 2015 by a powerful network of Mandarin-speaking Chinese people in the United States of America. NATIONAL FILE has obtained video of Raffensperger speaking at an event with Mandarin-speaking Chinese people, begging the Chinese people to get him more than 100 votes to secure his victory in the election (which he ended up winning by 159 votes).

A Mandarin-language newspaper that actively coordinates with United Front, a network contro
lled by the Chinese Communist Party, even explained the strategy to place Raffensperger into office by use of “absentee ballots” that could be obtained by one Chinese person and distributed to others. Raffensperger is trying to stop Communist China’s geopolitical foe President Donald Trump from gaining a proper accounting of the votes in the 2020 presidential election.

HERE IS A LINK TO RAFFENSBERGER MAKING A CALL SPEAKING MANDARIN CHINESE THANKING THE CHINESE FOR ELECTING HIM TO THE STATE LEGISLATURE IN 2015.

HERE IS A LINK TO A MANDARIN-LANGUAGE ARTICLE FROM 2015 in the “Atlanta America Chinese Life” publication at Americachineselife.com, a publication supporting Democrats in the January 2021 Georgia U.S. Senate runoffs.

NEWSPAPER ACTIVELY COORDINATES WITH UNITED FRONT, A CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY NETWORK, AS EVIDENCED BY THIS ARTICLE DOCUMENTING THEIR MEETING.
The article about Raffensperger’s election in the United Front-linked newspaper can be translated into English via Google Translate, and states the following — emphasis added:
“One of the reasons why we did not participate in elections in the past was that “one more vote, one less vote has no effect on the results of the election.” This time is different. In the first round of election, there were only two candidates left in the 50th District of the House of Representatives where Johns Creek was located: Brad Raffensberger (sic) and Kelly Stewart. They are all conservative Republicans, with almost the same political opinions. Only 2,500 of the 25,000 voters in the first round voted: Brad was only 26 votes behind Kelley.

Brad took the initiative to approach the Asian community to understand and listen to our voices. He visited the Chinese Dance and Culture School in the city center the previous weekend. Last Saturday he visited the Atlanta Modern Chinese School with more than 500 students. On Sunday, he hosted 30 Chinese at home to talk about his ruling philosophy. As a city councillor, he also participated in the award ceremony of my boy scout team and spoke on behalf of the city government…

According to statistical calculations, we only need 100 Chinese votes this time to determine the outcome of the election and make Brad a victory. He will represent our voice in the state legislature in the future. We have already boasted about Haikou with him and guaranteed 100 votes.

This is an excellent opportunity for us Asians to show their strength. Your vote has never been so important. Election day is Tuesday, February 3. If you can’t vote in person on the day of something, I can apply for an absentee ballet (sic) for you. After you receive it, you can fill in and send it out. Due to the tight mailing time, if you need, please email me vale@PingMortgage.com.

In addition, in the municipal council election in September this year, Chinese people are likely to stand for election. Thank you for your attention…Xiao Yu”

(NOTE: Georgia law forbids people applying for absentee ballots for other people except if the person is out of the county temporarily or if the person applying is a direct relative of the voter).

HERE IS A 2017 ARTICLE IN WHICH THE SAME CHINESE-LANGUAGE PUBLICATION BRAGS ABOUT HANDPICKING RAFFENSPERGER FOR OFFICE, stating, “After a month of hard work and help from the Chinese, he finally won the final election…Shun aroused fighting spirit, so I and Brad reported the number of Chinese votes every hour. In the end, Brad won the victory. The numbers we quoted are very close, obviously the Chinese votes played a key role in winning.”

HERE IS A VIDEO OF RAFFENSPERGER SPEAKING AT THE EVENT, FOLLOWING A MANDARIN SPEAKER, BEGGING THE CHINESE PEOPLE FOR VOTES.

Raffensperger discusses absentee ballots at 0:48, discusses the number of votes he needs to win specifically at 1:12, hints at trading political favors with the expression “Out of little acorns, great trees grow” at 1:27, and again begging for votes at 3:12.

HERE IS MORE OF RAFFENSPERGER SPEAKING AT THE EVENT

HERE IS RAFFENSPERGER COORDINATING WITH THE CHINESE PEOPLE ON VOTING

HERE ARE SOME PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT WHERE RAFFENSPERGER BEGGED FOR CHINESE VOTES

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