Integrity Counts

INTRODUCTION

I don’t expect history to long remember the name Brad Raffensperger. I do, however, believe future generations of Americans will remember these times when a president who lost an election refused to concede and instead went about challenging the integrity of America’s core democratic institutions. Calling into question state election procedures, he persuaded many of his supporters—with anger and indignation, but without real evidence—that he was the rightful winner. The political system and the courts alike rejected his claims, but many voters, fanned by the president’s rhetoric, were convinced that those institutions were part of the problem, that the new chief executive was illegitimate, and the election system had failed them.

As secretary of state for the state of Georgia, I stood at times as subject, object, and target in the unfolding drama. In these pages, I will share my experience and observations with the hope my words might help rebuild confidence in our elections.

One of the most troubling questions in the wake of the 2020 election is whether we will see every candidate who loses a major election refuse to accept the results, and instead set out to raise money and build support on unfounded claims of fraud and corruption. To avoid that prospect, we must come to terms with the scope of the problem, but doing so won’t be comfortable for either party.

I say either party because the 2020 crisis was not unprecedented in Georgia. By November 2020, I had been challenging the claims of a stolen election for nearly two years. From my perspective, the most striking aspect of the Trump ordeal was not its novelty, but the unshakable sense of déjà vu that dogged me throughout.

When President Donald Trump stood before a crowd near the White House on January 6, 2021, and proclaimed, We will never concede.… You don’t concede when there’s theft involved,¹

my mind leaped back to the fall of 2018, when Stacey Abrams, who had just lost the race for governor of Georgia, told a crowd of supporters, So, to be clear, this is not a speech of concession. Concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede.²

The similarities don’t end there, and when considered with some care, they paint a troubling picture of an all-too-bipartisan willingness to undermine the integrity of our democracy, and the public’s confidence in it, for the sake of personal, partisan, and financial gain.

A president of the United States has a unique responsibility to defend the Constitution, and President Trump’s rallying of his supporters against the election results led to a violent attack against Congress and his own vice president at the Capitol. Abrams was not a sitting government official when she refused to concede her election, but as a major national figure, she had a distinct obligation to avoid slandering our electoral system. While her false charges (thankfully) did not lead to violence, they continue to be widely believed and repeated even now, particularly by people who claim to be concerned about the integrity of our democracy. The corrosive effects of such lies are spreading still.

These threats to public confidence from both sides of the political divide are at odds with the realities of American elections. The fact is this: Our elections are both fairer and more secure than they have been at any point in our history. Voter participation rates are high, and evidence of widespread fraud is exceedingly rare. And yet, thanks to irresponsible rhetoric from members of both parties, Americans are increasingly skeptical of their country’s ability to hold free and fair elections.

To point to the breadth of the problem, therefore, is not to draw equivalences or to minimize or exaggerate the misbehavior of one person or party. It is, rather, to clarify the scope of the challenge confronting all those who want to restore faith in our democracy.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan began his first inaugural address by noting the significance of the peaceful transfer of power in our country:

The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place as it has for almost two centuries, and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-four-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.³

That ceremony is the capstone of a complex, multilayered, decentralized process of running elections that are safe, accessible, reliable, and fair. Accomplishing it has never been a simple matter, but our country is actually quite good at it. The secrets to its success are fairness, trust, and integrity. Those three values are closely intertwined.

But we can no longer take that combination for granted, and we cannot treat the shortage of public confidence in our elections as the fault of one side or another alone. It is a problem that runs to the core of our civic culture. To address it, we all must acknowledge our role in causing it, and take on the hard work of building mutual trust by becoming more worthy of it.

CHAPTER 1

WAIT. LISTEN. RESPECT.

HELLO, BRAD AND RYAN AND everybody. We appreciate the time and the call.

The voice on my cell phone speaker belonged to President Donald Trump. My wife, Tricia, and I sat at our kitchen counter with the phone in a metal stand so I could take notes as we listened.

My first thought when I heard the president’s voice was, What would my dad think of this? His son is talking to the president of the United States.

But this was no time for wandering thoughts. I knew why the president was calling, and I needed to focus. He got right to the point. So, we’ve spent a lot of time on this, he said, and if we could just go over some of the numbers, I think it’s pretty clear that we won. We won very substantially in Georgia.

I was tempted to interrupt, to offer a correction, but then I heard my dad’s voice in my head.

Wait. Listen. Respect.

So I listened and waited for an invitation to respond.

It was Saturday afternoon, January 2, 2021, sixty days after the presidential election. Beginning long before the election and every day since, President Trump had attacked the foundation of our democracy and undermined Americans’ faith in our electoral institutions. He had tweeted insults and threats at me and at Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. Now he was directly attacking the election itself. He was asking me, as Georgia’s secretary of state, to find 11,780 votes—enough for him to claim a win in our state.

I could not do that, because the data didn’t support it. In my analysis, this was a physical impossibility; there were not 11,780 votes to be found. Since assuming office in January 2019, my team and I focused our efforts to head off every possible avenue for election fraud. Proactively, in early 2020 right after COVID-19 hit, I created the Absentee Ballot Fraud Task Force because I fully expected more voters would want to vote from the safety of their homes rather than risk going out and voting in a public setting. I was chastised in the press by prominent Democrats for that decision. The task force members consisting of conservative Republicans, Democrats, and independents had strong election integrity and legal backgrounds to help ensure robust security measures were in place in Georgia.

I voted for President Trump, and I am a lifelong conservative Republican with a proven voting record to match. But I could not do what he asked, because the numbers just weren’t there. My job as secretary of state is to oversee fair and honest elections for everyone. Was I disappointed in the outcome? Yes. Could I change the outcome? No.

Our nation and our democracy have survived for nearly two and a half centuries because we hold free and fair elections secured with integrity. It’s the ultimate trust-but-verify system, with multiple layers of technology and oversight to prevent fraud. We count and accurately record every legal vote. We recount when necessary, and we cannot be persuaded to report anything but the facts. Not by the president. Not by anybody.

Questions and cynicism about our elections in recent years have diminished trust from both Republicans and Democrats. Some falsely believed that Russian hackers altered votes in the 2016 presidential election and allowed Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton. Some Georgia Democrats made false claims that voters were suppressed or that problems with voting machines allowed Republican Brian Kemp to defeat Democrat Stacey Abrams in the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia.

Although the idea was not original to him, Trump’s attack on our electoral system was louder and more destructive by orders of magnitude than any that preceded it.

Earlier in the day, Neil Cavuto had interviewed me for Cavuto Live on Fox News. I had driven to a studio in northeast Atlanta where he spoke with me on the air from New York. You are secretary of state, he said. You’re also Republican. So you have an interest in the Republicans running.⁴

A moment later he said again, You are a Republican, and you’ve announced your support for the Republican candidates in the past.⁵

Then he asked me about the presidential election results and wondered how Joe Biden could have received 12 million more votes nationally than Barack Obama.

My response was similar to what I had been saying since November.

I told Cavuto that I couldn’t address the results in the other states, only in Georgia, and I explained why the votes did not add up to a win for President Trump. Here are the facts, I said. Twenty thousand Republican voters, traditional Republican voters [who had voted in the June primary] just skipped the presidential race. Senator David Perdue got 19,000 more votes in the metro regions [of Atlanta and Athens] than President Trump did. And in our Republican congressional areas, [Georgia’s Republican candidates] got 33,000 more votes than President Trump.⁶

Thousands of Georgians had voted for Republican candidates down the ballot, but for Biden at the top of the ticket.

If President Trump had been as popular as Senator Perdue in the suburbs, he would have carried Georgia. If 20,000 Republicans who voted in June had shown up in November, Trump would have carried Georgia. If President Trump had polled as well as Republican congressional candidates in Republican districts, he would have easily won Georgia. And truth be told, my life, my family’s lives, and my staff’s lives would have been a lot calmer and safer. He still wouldn’t have won the presidency, but Georgia would not have been his whipping post. It’s sad to have to admit that the state GOP badly lost the organizational and ground game to the Democratic Party.

To confirm the accuracy of the results, we recounted every legal ballot in every county by machine and by hand—just over 5 million of them. We brought in Georgia Bureau of Investigation experts to augment our secretary of state investigator staff auditing signatures on absentee ballot envelopes. Every count, recount, and audit led to the same result: Biden received more votes than Trump in Georgia.

I drove home after the interview, and around lunchtime the deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, called and said, President Trump saw you on Fox News this morning. Mark Meadows called me and said he wants to talk to you. Meadows was the president’s chief of staff.

The president wants to talk to me?

Yes, sir.

Since the election, Trump had called into question Georgia’s election procedures almost daily, and he persuaded many of his supporters—with anger and indignation, but without evidence—that he was the rightful winner. He took his claims to court and was rejected on the facts. On the last day of 2020, Trump had filed Trump v. Kemp and Raffensperger, a lawsuit against Governor Kemp and me directing us to decertify the valid results of the presidential election in Georgia.

I told Jordan that I was reluctant to take the president’s call with the lawsuit hanging over us. She said Meadows was insistent, so I agreed, but I said, I don’t think it’s appropriate for just the president and me to be on the line. I want you and Ryan to be on the call too. Ryan Germany was the general counsel in our office. They both needed to hear everything that would be said.

As I agreed to take the call, I anticipated the tone of it. I had an idea of what to expect from President Trump. He’s a real estate developer, and I’ve dealt with dozens of developers in my career. I am a structural engineer, and my company provides high-strength steel for construction projects. I’m a subcontractor. When I’m on a job site, the developer is at the top of the food chain, and when the developer is having an issue, whatever it is, it all rolls downhill to the general contractor and then to the subcontractor. The conversation might start off friendly, then they turn up the pressure, and if they don’t get what they want—which usually means at no additional cost or extension of time to the schedule—it can become a one-way, high-volume conversation. Trump was the developer, and I was the subcontractor.

Jordan called Meadows, and he agreed to our conditions. They scheduled the call for three o’clock. Perhaps, I thought hopefully, I could lay out the facts, and this would be the beginning of the end of the turmoil.

It wasn’t.

CHAPTER 2

PARENTS OF A PRODIGAL SON

CONSTANTLY, TRICIA AND I ARE asked why we remained calm through all of this. How can you just respond without anger or resentment?

That’s because to know us is to know our story.

Everyone has a story. When I know a person’s story, I have a better idea about what makes them tick, what is important to them, and why. For the next two chapters, with Tricia’s help, I’d like to share some of ours.

A big component of my story—and how and why I had the strength to stand resolutely against the onslaught of misinformation, disinformation, outright lies, and derogatory name-calling—is reflected in my parents, who raised and instilled timeless values in my siblings and me: grit, honesty, courage, integrity, hard work, respect, loyalty, faithfulness, manners, perseverance. Grit and perseverance get you through far worse things in life than this election and a president who felt that bullying the secretary of state of Georgia was his only means to change the outcome. (Even if I had acquiesced to his demands, Georgia was but one state, and he needed at least two more to change the final outcome.)

I’ve been through worse became our motto in the weeks and months following the 2020 election. Anyone who has lost a child knows there is nothing on earth more heart-wrenching, life-changing, and devastating. That’s real life, that’s real hurt, and nothing can come close to that kind of loss. Sadly, I also know that we are not alone out there. Many families, like us, have been ravaged by the epidemic of addiction. Many parents, spouses, siblings, and children have lost a loved one to this dreaded disease.

Our pain also comes from the many people who have recently turned their backs on us without the benefit of an explanation, just as others did in the early stages of our son’s addiction. It was a road we were all too familiar with.

We have experienced how quickly and easily decisions and judgments can be made based on the lack of knowledge and facts. Addiction is a disease and is simply not in anyone’s control. Our son was an addict, but that did not make him less than, and it did not make us bad parents. Now, as then, we stayed the course.

As the election outcome became a focus of national news, I knew we had the facts, and I knew over time the truth would be revealed and believed. Of course, Tricia did too. She had agreed to limited media interviews, where she explained that we are simply real people who love our family, have worked hard to build a business, and believe in the American way that putting your nose to the grindstone can get you to a better place in this life.

Brad also believed he could make a difference in politics, Tricia says. I love my husband enough to know that his passion and belief in that was enough for me to give him the green light to pursue that dream. So when people ask how we maintained our composure when Trump was tweeting at Brad or telling the media and the world from the White House that he was ‘an enemy of the people,’ I knew that these were words of insincerity and were untrue. President Trump doesn’t know us at all. He assumed we would blindly roll over to any requests he had because he labeled us and called us names.

You may have been through worse too. You may have lost someone you loved during 2020 when we lost so many. We all face life events more difficult than having somebody call us names, even if that someone is the president.

The worse for us was losing our oldest son three years ago. Brenton had fought drug and alcohol addiction from the time he was fifteen years old. His life was a roller coaster of clean and sober, then using; clean and sober, then using; incarceration, then clean and sober. At twenty-six he was diagnosed with stage 3B Hodgkin’s lymphoma, cancer in lymph nodes and cancerous tumors above and below his diaphragm. There were days fighting cancer when he told us he just wanted to die, and there were times when the pain drove him back into his addiction. Day after day and month after month and year after year, we prayed for a healing miracle… until the day we got that proverbial knock on the door to find out he had died of an overdose of fentanyl.

Yes, we’ve been through worse.

We prayed every day for twenty-three years for our son to stay clean and sober, for God to heal him. He didn’t answer our prayers the way we wanted, but He was always there to walk with us.

It’s hard to understand why our prayers aren’t answered when we lose something so precious, when we pray so fervently for so long. And yet, as I say, God was with us.

Despite the loss of our son, God has given Tricia and me a sense of peace I cannot explain, because I do not