Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) wrote in a new book that former President Donald Trump demonstrated little understanding of how elections are conducted during their recorded Jan. 2 phone call.
The Georgia elections official on Tuesday released his book, “Integrity Counts,” which details how Trump’s persistent disinformation after the election culminated in the hourlong phone call in which the then-president told him, “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” the exact number he needed to flip Georgia’s result in his favor.
“This repeated request for votes showed me that President Trump really had no idea how elections work. The secretary of state’s office doesn’t allocate any votes,” Raffensperger wrote in an annotation of the call, the transcript of which is included in the book, according to The Hill.
Raffensperger, a lifelong Republican, told The Hill in an interview he wasn’t sure if Trump was being intentionally dishonest or if he actually believed the claims he was making.
“At the time of the call in January, I didn’t know if he believed what he was saying. I didn’t know if he was trying to push a narrative, or was he just believing stuff that was fed to him?” Raffensperger said. “As a conservative-with-a-capital-C Republican, I’m disappointed like everyone else is. But the cold hard facts are that President Trump did come up short in the state of Georgia.”
Trump made a number of false allegations during that call, which Raffensperger investigated and debunked.
Trump said he was told that close to 5,000 ballots had been cast in the names of dead people. Raffensperger’s audit found two cases where this had occurred. Trump said 4,925 out-of-state voters had cast ballots in Georgia. Raffensperger found 300. And Trump repeatedly suggested that Fulton County officials shredded thousands of ballots. There’s no evidence that happened.
“Every single allegation that he made in that call and every allegation that his surrogates made, we ran those down and they were not supported by the facts,” Raffensperger told The Hill.
In the face of vocal and public pressure from Trump and allies after the election, Raffensperger staunchly refuted claims about widespread fraud in Georgia’s election, prompting harassment and death threats from Trump supporters.
In May, he was criticized for backing ― and therefore lending credence to ― a further, disinformation-driven inspection of the ballots. He said he supported it in order to “restore voter confidence” even though he maintained there was no evidence of widespread fraud.