While Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger attempted to assure the public this week that Election Day will be free of fraud, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is sending monitors to six Georgia counties just to make sure.
Speaking to a group of reporters in Gwinnett County, Raffensperger discussed the Peach State’s historic early voter turnout and expressed confidence in his office’s efforts to deliver a midterm election that Georgians can trust.
“We’re having really strong turnout, about 5-7% higher than we had back in 2022, with one less day of voting. Voters are engaged in the process,” he said.
Later, Raffensperger gave former U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a member of the secretary’s Election Integrity Task Force, a chance to discuss the group’s work.
“The purpose of the task force is to help ensure that the integrity of the voting system around the state is impeccable, and that’s what we’re seeing today,” Chambliss said.
It’s All About Building Trust
After Chambliss spoke, a reporter asked Raffensperger about ensuring trust among voters and preventing the spread of misinformation following Election Day. He replied by discussing the 20 statewide audits Georgia will undergo following the results on election night.
“We’re going to be doing 20 risk-limiting audits, and that’ll be 14 of the congressional [elections] and then six of the statewide [elections],” the secretary of state said.
Each county will be doing a total of seven risk-limiting audits, according to Raffensperger, and ballot images are going to be tabulated by a scanner, to further verify the results.
“Those ballot images are going to be run through a scanner, be read, [and] not through the QR code,” he said. “[The ballot image is] what gets tabulated for every single race—U.S. senator, governor, all the way down to the Water and Sewer Board, everyone in between—all across the state of Georgia, and we report those.”
Raffensperger stressed his efforts to “build trust and confidence,” saying that there are “observation areas” for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to observe the process, “and the] Republican party, to come in and take a look at this process, “especially during the absentee ballot acceptance and tabulation.”
Past Controversies, Ongoing Concerns
Despite Raffensperger’s assurances, some, including President Donald Trump, have expressed concerns about Georgia’s election integrity, especially as it relates to the 2020 election results.
According to a transcript of a call between Trump and Raffensperger following that election, and reported in 2021 by The Washington Post, Trump said that there were “anywhere from 250 to 300,000 ballots [that] were dropped mysteriously into the rolls,” and that this was closely linked to Fulton County. After listening to Trump’s explanation of why he should intervene, Raffensperger dissented, saying, “We don’t agree that you have won.”
According to a detailed investigative report earlier this month from The Center Square, Georgia’s current election system has vulnerabilities that could be exploited. In that report, Mark Davis, an elections data analyst and president of Data Productions Inc., warned state officials about the potential for illegal ballots to be cast by people no longer living at their addresses of record. According to the news outlet, the “state’s elections office … refused to look at data estimating the extent of the problem.”
Trump’s DOJ Will be Watching Closely
This week, a reporter asked Raffensperger if he was concerned that Trump may “interfere” with the state’s elections, particularly with the deployment of “federal election monitors.” The Department of Justice plans to deploy monitors to six counties statewide, all of which are Democrat strongholds in the state: Bibb, Chatham, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett.
According to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the role of the DOJ election observers would be to monitor elections.
Following the reporter’s question on DOJ election watchers, Raffensperger dismissed any notion of concern, saying, “I expect that the DOJ monitors will be professionals like they always have been for all the other previous election cycles.”
He added that folks from Washington, D.C., and across the nation have expressed concerns about “noncitizens on the voter list.” He then continued to explain how he “did the first citizenship verification in the entire country in ’22,” as well as in 2024 and 2026.
He also boasted of the report from the Department of Audits, saying, “The Department of Audits did an outside audit to look and make sure that our list was clean, and it’s 99.9% accurate.”
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
