The second part of the “Red & Blue” interview with Raffensperger will air on CBSN at 5 p.m. Tuesday.
George Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he wrote his new book “Integrity Counts” to “set the record straight” about what happened — and didn’t happen — during the contentious 2020 presidential election.
Donald Trump lost the Peach State narrowly to Joe Biden, but the former president and his allies have persisted in their unfounded claims of mass voter fraud, which Mr. Trump blamed for his loss in Georgia. He repeatedly lambasted Raffensperger, who is a Republican, for defending the fairness and integrity of the election. Georgia prosecutors have opened a criminal inquiry into the ex-president’s attempts to influence the election.
“Well, we were sure on the facts back on January 6 when I wrote a 10-page letter to Congress, and I told them that all the allegations that had been made by the Trump campaign were not supported by the facts,” Raffensperger said on CBSN’s “Red & Blue” in the first part of an interview that aired on Monday. “I go through it point by point. There weren’t 5,000 or 10,000 dead people that voted, there was less than five. There weren’t 66,000 underage voters, there were zero. There weren’t thousands of felons, there was less than 74. And so, I wrote the book to set the record straight.”
The Georgia secretary of state said his book is filled with footnotes so readers can see the evidence to back up his assertions about the election.
“And as Republicans, I know many are disappointed in the results, I understand that. But the fact is that President Trump came up short,” Raffensperger said.
The secretary of state said that in his book, he’s trying to give readers the context that the 2020 presidential election wasn’t their “first rodeo.” And he pointed out that the claims of voting irregularities came from Democrats, too. He noted that the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in 2018, Stacey Abrams, made sweeping claims of voter suppression and also didn’t concede.
“And really her whole narrative set the table for 2020, President Trump just ramped it up to a higher level, he did the same thing about stolen election claims, but he was on the other side of the coin, called voter fraud,” Raffensperger said. “Neither one of them are supported by the facts, and it really destabilizes society when both people attack the legitimacy and the integrity of our election process.”
Raffensperger disputed any notion that he’s a politician; he sees himself as an “elected public servant.”
“I stand on integrity, I stand on the truth, and I’ll make sure that we fight hard for honest and fair elections. And I won’t get pushed off my view that everyone’s vote should count, and we’ll make sure it’s counted accurately,” he said.
Raffensperger said the attorney general has a large caseload unrelated to Mr. Trump, but said his office has sent her the requested documents related to the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s actions after the presidential election.
