Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) believes that former President Donald Trump knows he lost the 2020 presidential election and that it was not rigged.
Speaking to The Washington Examiner ahead of Trump’s planned rally in Georgia on Saturday, Raffensperger said, “What bothers me, and it really should bother everyone, after 10 months since the last ballots were counted, we’re still dealing with this misinformation and disinformation surrounding the elections.”
Raffensperger continued, “He’s going to come, and he’s going to say what he’s going to say, but he knows in his heart that he lost the election.”
“[Trump’s] continued to promote the big lie, and then he’s also fundraising off this issue just like Stacey Abrams has.”
His comments referenced former Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams who lost her bid for the statehouse in 2018. She accepted defeat but refused to concede as she claimed that voter suppression played a role in her loss.
Raffensperger is writing a new book titled “Integrity Counts” in which he “speaks out against the former president’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and hopes to restore confidence and trust in our country’s elections.”
In January, Trump called Raffensperger to pressure him to investigate allegations of fraud, as IJR reported.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” he said during the phone call, adding, “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
However, the secretary of state pushed back, noting, “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
Trump was also heard saying, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”
“We won the election, and it’s not fair to take it away from us like this, and it’s going to be very costly in many ways, and I think you have to say that you’re going to reexamine,” he added.
President Joe Biden won the state by an 11,779 vote margin.
After the election, Trump repeatedly claimed that there was widespread fraud that altered the outcome of the election. However, several recounts and legal challenges failed to change the result, and Congress voted to certify Biden’s win.
A draft report of a review of Arizona’s election results also failed to substantiate Trump’s claims of fraud, as IJR reported.
Instead, the draft report of the election results conducted by the company Cyber Ninjas found 99 additional votes for Biden and actually found 261 fewer votes for Trump in Maricopa County.
