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It is a measure of the control that Donald Trump now exercises over the Republican Party that when he began to make unsubstantiated claims about the manipulation of the presidential elections, few senior members of the party dared to contradict him.
Despite there being no evidence of widespread fraud, the party has largely lined up behind the president and his attacks on the integrity of the elections.
But there are exceptions. In Georgia, a previously reliably red state that Trump lost by a margin of 13,000 votes, a Republican election official has repeatedly challenged the president’s falsehoods and received death threats over the problem.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, has become the lightning rod for attacks by his own party. Faced with a barrage of misinformation about the White House election results and pressure from fellow Republicans, the 65-year-old has stood his ground and repeatedly assured the public that voting in Georgia was free and fair and that there was no systemic fraud. Has been discovered.
The attacks against him began shortly after it became clear that President-elect Joe Biden was going to win the state of Georgia, turning it from red to blue for the first time since 1992. They escalated as Raffensperger, whose job it is to administer the elections. statewide – oversaw Georgia’s manual ballot counting process, which is automatically triggered when a candidate’s margin of victory is less than 0.5 percent.
The effort saw nearly 5 million votes counted by hand to ensure the integrity of the result. The count was expected to end on Wednesday night, with no major changes to the original count. But the president has repeatedly undermined the process.
“The Georgia Secretary of State, a supposed Republican (RINO), will not allow people who check the ballots to see the signatures for fraud. Why? Without this, the whole process is very unfair and almost meaningless. Everybody knows we won the state, ”Trump wrote on Twitter over the weekend.
The president was joined in his attacks by Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who are facing a runoff in Georgia after neither won the required majority, and both called for Raffensperger’s resignation.
“There have been too many failures in the Georgia elections this year and the most recent election has shed national light on the issues,” Loeffler and Perdue said in a joint statement, without providing any evidence to support their claims. “The Secretary of State has failed to hold honest and transparent elections. He has failed the people of Georgia and should resign immediately. “
Doug Collins, a Republican representative in the Georgia House of Representatives who failed to make it to the second round and now leads the president’s recount efforts in the state, also blamed Raffensperger for Trump’s loss.
“Frankly, the secretary of state’s office has caused this problem to develop. They have been continually troublesome in this. And I will continue to call them and force them to do this, ”Collins told Newsmax, a pro-Trump media outlet.
Raffensperger, a civil engineer who founded and ran his own company before applying for his current position in 2018, has responded in kind.
“I’m an engineer. We look at numbers. We look at hard data,” Raffensperger told the Washington Post. “I can’t prevent a failed candidate like Collins from lying to everyone. He’s a liar. “
The Republican, who was endorsed by Trump when he ran for secretary of state, also rejected calls from Senators Loeffler and Perdue, insisting the election was a “resounding success.”
“If I were Senator Perdue, I would be upset if he was in a runoff. And both senators and I are unhappy with the potential outcome for our president,” he said in response to his statement. “But I am the duly elected Secretary of State. One of my duties is to help organize elections for all Georgia voters. I have taken that oath, will fulfill that duty, and will follow Georgia law.”
For doing the job he was sworn to do, Raffensperger and his wife have received death threats. The first ones he said “were subtle, then they became more graphic.”
“My wife has received most of the threats … but it is very annoying and quite disgusting when your own party does that,” he said. One said, “You better not screw up this count. Your life depends on it.”
He has accused fellow Republicans of creating a dangerous environment by using “emotional abuse” to rile the party base against election officials in an effort to increase turnout in the upcoming runoff elections.
“It is really the spinners who should be ashamed to play with people’s emotions,” he said. The hill. “Politicians on both sides should never play on people’s emotions. It’s one thing to motivate people, I get it. But stimulating people and playing with their emotions is emotional abuse and they should grow up and start acting with integrity.
He told CNN this week that he would continue on the path to certify the Georgia election results even though he wanted Trump to win the election.
“I will probably be disappointed because I was encouraging the Republicans to win,” he said. “But I have a process, I have a law that I follow. Integrity in this office is important. ”
Raffensperger’s public opposition to unfounded attacks on election integrity may not make news in normal times. But his lonely status as a bulwark against a current of disinformation led by the president says a lot about the current state of the Republican Party.
Far from being the repudiation of Trumpism that Democrats hoped for, the November presidential elections were unexpectedly close. Trump actually increased the number of votes he received compared to four years ago to more than 70 million, the second-highest number of votes received by a presidential candidate in history, behind only Biden.
Although he lost the vote, the president cemented his status as leader of the Republican Party, a reality that has made Republicans reluctant to speak out against him for fear of damaging their own political perspectives. Among those who have remained speechless in the face of its falsehoods are once fierce critical party figures such as Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
Mitt Romney is one of the few high-level Republicans to criticize Trump’s attacks on the electoral process, writing on Twitter in the days after the election that the president is “wrong to say the election was rigged, corrupted and stolen.” and that such assertions “harm the cause of freedom here and throughout the world … and recklessly kindle destructive and dangerous passions.”
But the attacks and pressure on Raffensperger have at times exceeded political bombast and bordered on electoral interference. The secretary of state detailed one such case this week, when he claimed that Lindsey Graham, a former Trump critic and now a vociferous supporter, called him to suggest he cast thousands of legally cast votes.
Graham reportedly asked Raffensperger if he could throw away all the vote-by-mail ballots in the counties where the highest signature differences were found, which he did not do.
“It sure looked like he wanted to go that way,” Raffensperger told the Washington Post.
The South Carolina senator vehemently denied asking for legal ballots to be thrown out, telling the newspaper that the problem for him was how to “protect the integrity of voting by mail and how signature verification works.”
“If you feel threatened by that conversation, you have a problem,” Graham added.
The broader context of the attacks on Raffensperger is that these efforts to reverse unfavorable outcomes for Trump are taking place across the country, led by Republicans in both Democratic and Republican states.
In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign has launched a barrage of lawsuits to try to overturn Biden’s victory there, citing false claims that election watchers were unable to get close enough to monitor the vote count. The Trump campaign is also seeking a recount in Wisconsin and an audit in Arizona.
In Arizona, another previously red state turned blue, election officials have also been on the receiving end of the ire of Trump supporters. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said in a statement that the threats of violence and vitriol she had received were a direct result of the President, members of Congress, and other elected officials “perpetuating misinformation and encouraging others to mistrusting the results of the elections in a way that violates the oath of office they took ”.
Attacks on the integrity of Arizona’s results prompted Clint Hickman, a Trump supporter and Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, to issue a statement defending the integrity of the election.
“More than 2 million ballots were cast in Maricopa County and there is no evidence of fraud, misconduct or malfunction,” he wrote in a letter to county residents.
In Michigan, Trump applauded two Republican pollsters who briefly refused to certify election results in Wayne County, the state’s largest and overwhelmingly Democratic county, before they finally backtracked.
“Wow! Michigan just refused to certify the election results! Courage is a beautiful thing. America is proud!” The president wrote on Twitter. Minutes later, colporteurs joined Democrats in certifying the results.
So far, Trump’s legal team has filed 28 lawsuits since Election Day and lost all but one. While they are unlikely to overturn the election result, the impact on Americans’ faith in democracy could be long-lasting.
About 52 percent of Republicans believe that Trump “legitimately won” the US election, but was stolen by widespread election fraud that favored Biden, a new Reuters / Ipsos report. Opinion poll found.
