Transcripts For CSPAN Georgia 20240705

Cox supports cspan. Getting you a front row seat to democracy. Coming, Georgia Republican secretary of state taking part in a discussion on election security. He discusses his phone call with former President Donald Trump in which posted in washington dc, this runs just over an hour. I am a freshman majoring in international politics. I have been involved where students get a behindthescenes look on a successful campaign. I have seen firsthand how increasing mistrust has negatively impacted the current political climate. The dedication serves as an excellent example for aspiring Public Servants like myself. Raffenspergers commitment it is my honor to introduce brad rafns perger, georgias secretary of state, first elected in 2019 and then overwhelmingly reelected in 2022. He was lexed Georgia House of representatives where he served for two terms an in 2018 he was elected secretary of state. The secretarys top priority is secure and accessible elections. As secretary of state, rafns perger delivered the largest implementation of Voting Machines in this country on time and on budget. Hes the first secretary of state to require photo inch d. For all forms of voting and first to hold counties accountable to voting by voters by expanding polling places. After his remarks, the secretary will take your questions. You can join in on social media. Join me in welcoming to stage, moe leffy and georgia secretary of state brad raffensperger. Good evening. Thank you so much for that warm introduction and for your continued participation in what we do at g. U. Politics. Thank all of you for coming tonight and spending part of your evening with us for what i expect will be a really interesting conversation. Mr. Secretary, thank you for coming up and visiting us here on campus. Mr. Raffensperger im looking forward to it. Moe we mo we met back in october, november, at a Panel Discussion i was moderating on the health of democracy. You were one of the panelists. But because it was a full panel we didnt get to dive too deep. Maybe you were ok with that. But tonight we are going to dive a little bit deeper. Part of our programming this election year, as weve been thinking about how we want to program leading up to this years election, were going to do a lot of stuff about the campaign. But i saw a poll about a month ago that gallup did, that asked how satisfied you were with how democracy is working in this country. A record low 28 of americans said that they were satisfied with how democracy was working. Thats 17 of republicans. 38 of democrats. And only 27 of independents. So were going to do a lot of programming this year about that. About trust in democracy. And i really wanted to kick that series off with this conversation. With you. Because the cornerstone of every democracy is the right to vote. Following the last president ial election, we saw real stress test on americas trust in elections. And you, this Structural Engineer who came to politics a little bit later from a nontraditional path, found yourself at the center of that national maelstrom. I want to start there. Not spend too much time there. And then look forward. But everyone here is familiar with the infamous phone call. Thenpresident of the United States calling you up, asking you to find him 11,780 votes. I guess i would just like to start, on a human level. What was it like getting that phone call and how did it how did you grapple with that . Brad well its not something i looked forward to. For many reasons. Because since the election of november, we had been pushing back on all the misinformation, disinformation. But somewhere, you know, the hopeful part of me was hoping if i have this call with the president and i give him the information, the data, that hell say oh, thats why i came up short. So thats what we did. We had a respectful conversation. And thats certainly i do want to emphasize, i want to let you know, i want to make sure i was respectful to his positional authority. Because what ive seen sometimes, a lot of people right now in america, people just start shouting out at people, at City Council Meeting or a state Senate Meeting or wherever that is they just dont respect peoples positional authority. I think thats important. That you respect your teachers. Respect your elders. But also respect you may not respect who they are as a person but the position that they hold deserves that respect. I want to make sure i was respectful of that. I really have thought, that would be honoring my parents. Thats how they brought us up. I know thats how they brought you up. Were all the same about that. I want to have a conversation, give him the information and hopefully then we can move forward. Mo you voted for him. Twice. Correct . Youre a conservative, a true republican. And suddenly you were the face of this election conspiracy against the candidate of your own party. That had really taken off. And ive listened to the phone call. I suspect many people here have as we i heard you walk through that data. Aye seen you since walk through the data of why he fell short. Why do you think that conspiracy and that lie resonated so much . Brad i think for republicans in georgia, you have to understand that we had run the tables on the democrats since about 2002 when we changed the state from being a democrat governor to a republican governor, governor sonny perdue and then governor deal and Governor Kemp. All of a sudden we lose a race. That was a shock to our system. We ought thought we were going to win. Its like some pro teams, going to win every year. Or u. G. A. , didnt get three in a row this year. Same shock to the system. Same idea. Then people didnt accept the results. They wouldnt realize, or would not just couldnt come to grips with this idea that they actually lost. To a guy that hid in the basement. Mo do you think its that simple . There have been winners and losers in elections since elections were invented. What is it about sort of the moment were in in our history right now, that is causing this type of distrust in the electoral results to feel more, i dont know, pronounced than maybe it had in the past . Brad normally when theres these situations and you give people the data, they accept it and they walk off. They dont just double down. Then you give them more data, and then they start, what about this. Give them the answer. Then they find something else. They kept doubling down, doubling down. All they really were doing was stirring up people and creating all this anger that somehow something had happened. And thats why we just continue to go out there and talk to people. Let them know, this is what happened. Is that there werent 66,000 underage voters. There were zero. There werent thousands of felons, there were less than four. Every single allegation in their lawsuit we responded with facts. We did that calmly and respectfully with the people. In effect, they were grieving for that loss. They couldnt believe it happened. Mo i want to talk, take it away from 2020, we can come back to it later, i suspect when we go to the audience questions, there may be some more. But the way i see it, correct me if you disagree, there are three main roles for those people in positions like yours, overseeing elections. Three main responsibilities, election administration. Vetter access. And election security. And when you hear people complain about their mistrust in elections, they kind of tend to focus on one or some combination of those three things. I would love to get your thoughts on each of them. Ive got a couple of thoughts but would love to hear additional ones that you may have. Lets start with election administration. How confident should people be in the way elections are administered . Brad by and large we are very good at it. There are questions where we are. Every county, every state probably has issues from time to time. But what they were is minor issues and generally wont affect the results. I dont believe theres widespread malicious efforts by county election officials. Let people talk about, for example, in france they can vote a whole ballot. They can count it by hand and be done that night. Well, when you go to these parliamentary systems, even the french president ial system, theres only one candidate on the race. In georgia were going to have, for our primary coming up in may of 2024, probably 17,000, actually, because its republican democrat, well probably have 34,000 different ballot styles for the entire state. Just imagine that. Because were not just talking about someone running for president. Were also talking about congress. County commissioner. State senator. You just go down the list. Even in our county of fulton county, we vote for the county surveyor. In glenn county, they vote for the water and sewer board. America is a very strong participatory constitutional republic. We have a lot of different races. All these precincts, 2,400 overlaid on that. Its very complicated because in spite of that we are very good at it. Mo one of the things we heard in 2020 in terms of how elections are administered, a lot of angst about from some people, was the move to mailin ballots, how long it took to count those. How long it took to count election day ballots. Wondering why it took so long in some places and not in others. Let me hear your thoughts just on that, right . Sort of the length of time it takes to count votes and how that might impact it. And what we can do to improve upon that. Brad i think 2020 was a oneoff because of covid. What we really saw, we had voted about a week we had three weeks of early voting for the president ial primary. The fact that the old laws we had in georgia, we had 16 days of early vote, we now have 17. People had voted for about a week and a half. Then georgia shut down. The country shut down as we tried to figure out what are we going to do with covid . We pushed the whole primary, including the rest of the president ial primary, out to may or june of 2020. And began that process. There was a huge upswing of absentee voting. How are you going to vote absentee. Many people started casting aspersions on it. They said with the ballot process in georgia and many other states, you use signature match to identify voters. How can i trust that . We actually were sued by, you know, the Democrat Party prior to that, saying thats subjective prior to that Republican Party said it was subjective. We have begun to photo i. D. And modeled it after minnesota, a blue state, with drivers licenses. We think thats objective. That was the first aspersion cast on the absentee ballot process. That said, when your absentee ballots come in, they have to verify the signature. Once you verify it, you take separate the eenvelope from the ballot, lay the ballot flat, and get it ready to go. Thats all they did. They didnt do a lot of preprocessing from that level. We had them do that and start scanning it. You didnt tabulate but started scanning it so you could then press the cablation button after close of election. Coming into the primary that we had in june, 2020, and other states, they were doing all of that after election day. That takes sometimes two ekes to do just because its a very labor intensive process that. Creates a lot of doubt. And its just a bleeding ground for conspiracy theories. So what we do now, ill tell you what we do now. And ill tell you also the thing about where we are. You go from 30 to 40 in 2020. Now were back down to 6 . And theres nothing we did, its just that covid changed. People can vote any way they want in georgia they can vote with 17 days of early voting, absentee voting. Some are going back to early voting. Now we do prescanning of all that before election day so we get all those early ballots already done. But its only 6 so we can get the results posted quickly. Time is not your friend in the election space. The longer it takes, then all of a sudden the conspiracy of why is it taking so long. Before 12 00 at night on election night, we will know how many ballots havent been counted yet, so therell be 50,000, 10,000, 100,000, whatever the number is so theres no ballot drops or ballot dumps down the road. That helps also build trust. I believe that trust is the Gold Standard of what were looking for. Accessibility, security, building trust. I think that really pulls our social fabric back together and we have people trying to pull it apart. Mo one other thing that war res me in terms of election administration, we are seeing since 2020 an intense targeting of election workers. By conspiracy theorists. Thats the most local level. Just the volunteers. Obviously your state had now the famous case of the two election workers who sued one of the most prominent election deniers. For damages. For the way they had personal by been targeted. Were seeing this across the country. And a lot of experienced election workers and volunteers are walking away. Its just too much hassle. Its too much for them and their families to get those latenight phone calls. And in some states the estimates are that its about 50 turnover or more. Thats a huge brain drain of people who are well versed, well experienced, in the mechanics of running an election day operation. How worried should we be about that . Brad to varying degrees depending on what state it is. The one advantage we have in georgia, my governor, Governor Kemp, and i both ran for reelection in 2022. You want to get reelected, you have to go out and talk to people. That was a good thing so we traveled all over the state and i talked to people all over the state, explaining what happened in the election. And i think for that, more people got the information, i think there was more healing. As part of that process. So its all good. So were not seeing that huge tailoff of election workers. Could we use more poll workers . Yes, we could. Whenever im talking to rotary, kiwanis, business chairman berke im always saying, please, who here has ever been a poll worker . See a show of hands, give them a round of applause if you havent done that, please, its the best thing you could ever do for everyone. I come out to vote. You come out to vote. Theres no poll workers, were going to have a real long day waiting. What do we do now . Its really important. That is very important. Also i noticed that oklahoma, a very strong conservative, pollworker protection was just signed into law. Dont harass those people. What theyre doing is pure, you know, good citizenship. Getting back to the communities. Mo lets talk about access. There are those, a lot of folks on the left, my party, who, um, have very serious concerns about attempts to limit access. As they would see it. So id love just, again, starting with a general question, your thoughts on how accessible the vote is, and then, you know, maybe your thoughts on some of the concerns that people have raised about voter i. D. Laws. About limiting the early vote in some states. I know you can only speak for yours. But in some states you do see a shrinking of the period for the early vote. Or limiting the number of early vote sites. And thousand hu that feeds into mistrust of elections on the left. Id love your thoughts on all of that. Brad well, what weve done is, in georgia we said were going to give you three options. No excuse absentee voting. Voting early. Voting on election day. You decide. And you decided. So georgia, 60 to 65 of people are voting early. About 30 are just vote on election day. 6 are voting no excuse absen teesm thats what our voters have told us. Other states may be different. But i think its good to have that. Ive heard there are studies that say the perfect number for early voting is about 10 days. We have 17 days and i would say we have 159 counties. The second most number of counties after texas. We have a lot of counties. Our smaller counties with 10,000, 15,000, they think two weeks is plenty. But we have to have the same for all of our counties and we landed on three weeks and two saturdays. The two saturdays, do you know wh votes on saturdays . Hardworking georgians who cant get off monday through friday. Its been good for either party. Doesnt favor anyone. Just gives people that option. But by doing that, people get to have that choice. We think thats the appropriate landing where we are. Some states have 10 days, like President Bidens state of delaware, 10 days. Were 17. We used to be a little bit longer we landed on here. Im good with that. And i think most georgians are comfortable where we are. Other states do a little bit more, a little bit less. What it really does also, it gives voters more options which we think is a good thing. But it also gives the county election offices, you know, a pressure relief valve. Imagine if that 65 of all early voters show up on election day . Now youre up to 94 , 95 . How are you going to run an election all of a sudden that swamp of people coming through there . Were not set up for that. What are we supposed to do . Well this allows you to space it out so we can, you the, really manage the short lines on election days. It all works for us in georgia. Thats why u. G. A. , its ok to mention the university here. Mo its allowed. Theyre not in the big east conference, so its ok. Brad u. G. A. And m. I. T. Did a study and over 90 of all georgiaians said we trust the results, we had a great voter experience. I think thats the sweet spot of where you want to be. Mo i have so many more questions on this. But well circle back. I want to get to audience questions soon. Lets talk about security. How secure are elections . And sort of the three pieces of this that im most curious about, allegations of fraud. How much fraud is there really in our elections . Concern over hacking. And foreign interference specifically. And then misinformation and disinformation. And the whole introduction of a. I. Many people here have heard the robo call on the eve of the New Hampshire primary that sounded a whole heck of a lot like President Biden telling democrats not to vote. Thats going to change quite a bit of how we have to secure our elections. So id love your thoughts on fraud, foreign interference, hacking and misinformation, disinformation. Brad going back to the 2020 election in georgia, but other states have done the same thing. If you look, we dont have underage voters. We dont have nonregistered voters. But recently we just went back to the 2022 cycle and were part of a multistate, you know, group of states that we share Voter Registration records. We found 17 double voters they voted in our state they voted in another state. Didnt think we were going to find you, we found you. We sent that to our local d. A. s. I dont know what happens in those other states, what theyll do with the 17 voters in their various states, but youre talking about 17 voters that voted in two states. I believe that fraud is, in our state, really nationwide, is not as large as people think it is. We also have photo inch d. We identify we also are real inch d. Compliant if you look at your georgia drivers license number, were real i. D. Compliant if you want to register to vote, department of Drivers Services does a robust citizenship check. We know if youre an american citizen or not if youre a lawful resident, you can get a drivers license in georgia but wont be registered to vote because youll be flagged as a noncitizen. We know who the american citizens are. Weve also done a robust citizenship check. We found 1,600 people that d. D. S. Flagged as noncitizens but we wanted to verify were they truly noncitizen, had they become american citizens, whats their status . Thats the numbers. Its not thousands or millions or things like that. And they werent registered to vote. So we have appropriate guardrails in place. So we really feel comfortable about that. And thats the most important thing. We think by having photo i. D. , it gives all of you confidence and so we can take that off. Making sure that were using photo i. D. For absent voting. By doing that, it builds trust. Mo talk about misinformation, disinformation and a. I. And how your office is thinking about that. Brad its we have the National Association of secretaries of state meeting starts, really, this evening, it started. Tomorrow over this weekend. One of the top subjects well be talking about will be Cyber Security and now this new thing called artificial intelligence. In fact, mo and i were up in new york, theres a fellow from an organization talking about a. I. , deepfakes. Its very almost i guess to use the word, ill use challenging. You can just you can use scary if you want to. Mo im scared. Brad what happens when its so good you dont know youre being faked out. Then it gets out there in social media and before you can say no, weve checked, its all made up, theres this hull ba loo and people are marching in the streets, what about this, what about that . So thats the concern. It really creates more of the social stress and lack of trust in our recesses. Mo in a couple of minutes i want to include the audience in our conversation, there are mics in each aisle, feel free to begin lining up. While the audience begins to line up i want to come full circle. And look backwards a little bit. So in 2022, there was sort of a bad year for election deniers. You guys, you and Governor Kemp survived your reelections, actually, didnt survive, you won fairy comfortably. A lot of candidates for secretary of state or chief election administrator or whatever the role may be across the country who were espousing the big lie lost. But theyre still around. Donald trump is the likely is likely to be the republican nominee. Overwhelming number of Republican Voters still believe he won. We saw that, see that in poll after poll. Saw it in the exit polls in iowa and New Hampshire. Theres about to be a change at the Republican National committee and the reported frontrunner to take over one of the two great Political Parties in this country is someone who espoused the conspiracies about the 2020 election. Even in your own state a lot of those folks in your own legislature are trying to tie your hands a little bit. Removing you from the election board. And giving the board power to investigate you, sort of as retribution, some would argue. So considering that, and the very real chance that donald trump will win reelection, im not going to ask you to endorse. I know you wont endorse in an election you have to oversee. But if this crowd does take power, does take over, do you have concerns about the Institutions Holding . How do you feel about the impact of that and of the continued attacks on the institution and the people who work within it . Brad if they win, theyll win fair and square. And if they lose, theyll lose fair and square. Its as simple as that. Whether they accept the results or are dancing you know, in the streets with joy and glee, you know, thats how theyll respond to the win or loss. At the end of the day, you know, were prepared and we will make sure we have fair and honest elections in georgia and i know the other states are working toward that. Were really making sure we have balanced accessibility with security. Youll have photo i. D. No matter how you vote we do robust citizenship checks. Were updating voter rolls objectively we dont just pull people off we make sure they have have they passed away . Have they moved out of state . Have they moved to a different precinct so we can update you, locate you . All those things we do, so we know the accuracy will never be closer. If they win, they win, fair and square. If they lose, theyve lost fair and square. Mo that mistrust resulted in violence last time. Do you have concerns about that this next time . Brad i will continue to be the person that ive been and im going to continue to talk respectfully with the facts and im going to do what i need to do which is follow the law and follow the constitution. I really would encourage all of you to consider that. You know, sometimes we really maybe, sometimes doubt where we are as a country. But this is a great country. And if you hold elected office, you need to understand that you have you swear an oath to the constitution of your state and to the United States of america. But as to elections people have fought and died for our freedom. Honor their sacrifice by just doing your job. Thats all i can really say. Thats what i pledge to do. And at the end of the day, the beautiful thing is, when you do your job, youll be able to look in the mirror at yourself for the rest of your life because you know youve done the right thing. You cut corners. And you somehow listen to the crowd. Dont do the right thing. Youre going to know in your heart you didnt do the right thing. How will you look at yourself in the mirror . How are you going to look at your spouse . How are you going to look at your kids . How about when your grandkids come along someday, what are you going to be able to tell them . I enjoy, because i did the right thing. I can enjoy a meal with my wife every night and dont have to worry about being someplace elsewhere i dont have the choice of what meal they serve in that serving line behind bars. I think its really, it boils down to what it is. Do the right thing. Youre really honoring every person who has ever served, ever thought, and the founders that, you know, devised this constitution, that they say its not perfect. Guess what, you can make it more perfect. Youre here in georgetown, youll figure it out. It takes a lot of work for these constitutional amendments. But just continue to be good people of integrity and it will all work out. Mo theyre going to have better questions than mine so lets go to them, though i do reserve the right to jump back in. When i point to you, tell us your name, where youre from, what youre studying and ask your question in the form of a question. [laughter] hi, secretary, thank you for joining us today. My name is amar, im a senior from illinois, chicago suburbs, in the school of foreign service, studying business and global affairs. My question is on the same theme that mrveg o just brought up. Consistently polls since 2020 all the way up to 2024 have shown that 60 to 70 of republicans still believe that the 2020 election was illegitimate and President Joe Biden did not win the election. Which to me is a little bit unfathomable. I cant wrap my head around it. So my question to you is, is that something we should be concerned about . Assuming it is, what do we need to do to change that . Brad i think we have to keep in mind in 2020, that was just a once in a century event. And theres just a lot going on. A lot of different parts. More people voted absentee than ever did before. People are going to go back to their traditional ways of voting. I think theyll probably feel a lot a lot more comfortable. Theres a lot of nervousness about absentee vote, mailin voting in other states. I think youll see people will go back to historical patterns like we have in georgia. We have shored up any questions that we may have had. Things we wanted, i owls thought it made more sense to use drivers license with photo i. D. We take that off the table so we dont get sued by the democrats and republicans. Take that off the table. Weve elevated confidence in that process. I think thats a lot of it. We are back to a more normal process. The campaigns will both be saying what theyre saying. Their job is to turn out people. And im going to make sure that i have even more data quicker because really what happened in georgia, the simple answer is that 33,000 people that voted in the republican primary in june 2020, did not come out to vote in the fall race. And thats on the campaigns. You know who votes in political partys campaigns, thats public data. The campaigns had that. Every day they could have said who voted early already . Who requested an absentee ballot . Have they turned their absentee ballot in . You can see theres 33,000 people that havent voted yet. You can call them, you send someone to pick them up, say, hey, bob, do you need ride to the holl polying location. They could have worked those people but they didnt, left them stranded. But the people that skip the top of the ticket, 27,900 people skipped the top of the ticket and voted down ballot we know that because a republican congressman in georgia got 27,554 more votes and that tailoff at the top and the republican congressman do better, that happened in many other states. People need to get the facts out, talk to people. Say this is about the campaigns. The election directors, election officials, will be ready for you. But you need to make sure if you want to win this race, get your people out. That goes for both sides. Their job are to turn people out. Our job is to make sure we have fair, honest, accurate elections. Thank you. Mo over here. Good evening, secretary. My name is kai, im from idaho, im here studying international politics. As a republican i have a lot of respect for you. A while ago i read an article about how some republicanled states have been pulling out of, i believe its called the eric voting registration system. And i was wondering, do you think that some of our partys efforts to that are advertised as making our elections more secure are actually make thepg less secure . Brad the electron i think Registration Information center was formed by the state. Georgia was one of the founding states. It was to come together with a multistate consortium to share confidential voting florid a secure protocol. They were doing that. And then all of a sudden, this social media operation came out and disparaged what was happening. The people that funded eric were actually the members of eric and states pulled out. I said were not pulling out. Were still members of eric. But the states that did pull out, like alabama, now ive done a bilateral with alabama. Im doing one with virginia. We have three other states. Well do bilaterals. Every state thats not a member. But some states already werent members just because of the cost, things like that. For example, nebraska, were looking at doing a bilateral with them. But also we now have gotten the data from department of Drivers Services. Theyre protective of the information they have. But we have the information driving when people get a drivers license and all other 49 states plus the district of columbia. So you go ahead and get a driers license in texas, nebraska, illinois, were going to find out about that. And then were going to say, why would they have a drivers license in illinois . Well reach out to you to find out, have you moved to illinois . And were also getting death records and other forms. So we actually right now, georgia, because were part of this multistate organization, we get those records, plus we have department of Drivers Services, plus bilaterals. We actually have the best records in the entire country. In fact, heritage which is a conservative funnation, so if youre on the left side, you dont care about heritage. But heritage is on the right side of the aisle. We were ranked number one for Election Integrity. Go figure. That must blow some peoples minds. Because we struck the proper balance of accessibility with security. And also the Bipartisan Policy Institute gave us very high marks as well as colorado tied for number one. Hi, secretary. My name is robbie, im a junior studying Computer Science and government at georgetown. Im from marietta, georgia. Ive lived in georgia my entire life. Brad awesome. As a georgia voter im heavily reliant upon the absentee ballot system. I just ordered one a few days ago. Brad awesome was it easy . Pretty easy actually. Brad there you go. Got to hand it to you. Brad youre welcome. [laughter] it was very easy. Brad we have a great team. My big question is relating to a lot of the changes that happened in 2021. And a lot of that was through the legislature, to my knowledge, not necessarily the executive branch. But one of the big changes was, it shortened the window that people could request ballots and also the window that counties could mail out ballots by about half, approximately half. And i was just curious because that makes it more challenging for students like me because we have shorter windows, i was curious if you could maybe speak on the rationale mind that and maybe the pros ancones behind that. Brad it was designed for two reasons. One is we found voters were requesting it out so early in the seekle before that they actually sometimes would misremember and then they would send in another application. It was gumming up the works for could by election operations. So that was that issue there. But we also found out is that you could request your ballot, you know, so late in the cycle, that you would never get it. What we found out, thats why we ended up on that 10day window that you had to get your ballot back and that request in 10 days before. If you got the request in 10 days before, we process the application, get you your ballot and get it back we found that after before 10 days, it was like a 92 acceptance rate but after the 10 days it was only 50 , 54 i believe was the number. So in effect, you were disenfranchising voters. It was almost, you know, unfair what you did to a voter. He was going to request it three days before. Hey, im sorry champ but youre not going to get it in time because the post office. Theres nothing that youve done wrong. Its just, its so late. It really made sure we didnt disenfranchise voters to improve the process. Thats why we did that. Thank you so much. Hi, secretary. Thank you for coming to speak with us today. My name is ben, im a senior in the college from new york majoring in physics and classics. And my question to you is, how does your education and background in engineering influence your development of as a politician and the way you approach policy making . Particularly involving issues related to largescale systems such as Election Integrity and expanding voting access. Brad thats a great question. One thing about elections, you just have to know how to add. Thats what its all about. I dont have to use any analysis, i dont have to use moment distribution and all these other engineering theorems. I dont need to know what a stress block is like we do for concrete design. Its adding up numbers. Its not even about subtracting, just addition. But im good with numbers. And i guess im really logical. And i just try and think through things. How do we improve the possess . How do we make incremental improvements. I think thats one thing engineers do, theyre always looking at how do you build a better bridge . How do you build a better building . In fact we were walking but washington, d. C. , i saw theres a big frame holding up part of the structure, the center was all taken down. Im thinking what theyre doing there. Im thinking about the process at all times. Thats how we think. I think thats really good for someone in this area. As secretary of state we had corporation professional licensing. Im a licensed Structural Engineer, Civil Engineer and contractor. I have important professional i know how important professional licensing is and how important corporations are. We have securities and charities. If you have a charity in georgia i want it to be a real charity, 50 or more, hopefully 80 , 90 , is going back out to the mission field, not in your back pocket. And youre making 3 million a year and the charity is getting nothing. So it really just kind of fit my wheelhouse. So i think its a great place. Would be a great place for a guy with a physics degree, Computer Science that Computer Science, dont do a. I. , please. Do good thing, not bad things so direct your energies toward the positive things in life. Thank you. Hi. My name is allie, im a sophomore in the college of arts and sciences double majoring in government and pa peace studies im also from marietta, crazily, that doesnt happen a lot here. My question is about the 2022 mid terms. There were about 1,000 absentee ballots that werent mailed out. Im sure you know about that. My question is how do you interact with county level elections offices . How are they being supported, what like how does that look like i guess . How do you make sure that all of them are working and doing the things theyre supposed to do . Brad thats interesting. This is a georgia issue. But throughout georgia we have 159 election directors and in cobb county, you actually have one of the best. Jeannine evler was fantastic. Someone on her team, you know, didnt have the experience and thats really where, theres no substitute for experience. Didnt have the experience. But she didnt throw that person under the bus she didnt try and push it off on us. She took full responsibility. And that really is a testament to her character. This is what happened with our group. Then she went ahead and said where are all these people and theyre sending this stuff out. Federal express, next day air. How do we make, how do we get that back to them . Tremendous, you know, recouping of what had happened. Really spoke highly of her character because yes, their office had this mistake. But she had been there for many years and was an outstanding person. Shes since retired but i want to commend her for her years dedicated, principled various from the people of georgia and for her county. Hi. Thank you for being here. My name is jordan park, im a freshman in the college of arts and sciences from seattle, washington. My question has to do with, it kind of comes back to the issue of faith in elections. My question is if you think the way districting is handled for electoral votes has any impact on faith in elections . Brad i think that redistricting is one of those issues that we now have a lot of districts that once you win your pray mare, then youre going to probably be the nominee. We have very few, you know, hinge districts. Not a lot of movement in that. Some people said should we have Nonpartisan Redistricting Commission . Trust me if it has something to do with elections its not going to be nonpartisan for long. If they put mo on that redistricting commission, he said im not partisan. Hes in the. Neither am i. So thats the challenge. I believe that the General Assembly should do the best that they can. Because if they overstep their bounds, it will all of a sudden get before a court. And then the court will say no, no. We cant were not buying that. So they looked at georgia. We had to tweak some lines. They looked at alabama. So i think General Assembly, by and large, know their ps and qs and they mind what they should be doing. So i think thats the best way forward. Other states have different things. Thats really a legislative decision because theyll determine, you know, how that ends up happening. I think at the end of the day, you know, no matter what district it is, if you have a candidate that doesnt behave himself they wont be reelected. Mo along with another reform, Electoral Reform people talk about that proponents argue would increase trust in elections is ranked choice voting. Your legislate your legislature voted against ranked choice voting. And you personally were not in favor of ranked choice voting. Brad i havent take on a position on it. I said what ive said is in georgia we have runoffs. We have runoffs for everything. Im the runoff champion of america. Ive been in four of them. City council. State house. Two for secretary of state. With one for the primary, one for the fall. I know how they work. But they create a tremendous burden because we have a fullweek runoff in november. Because we have one in november 20, 24, guess what it butts up to . Thanksgiving. At the end of the race for the race in thov, well have ballots come in by friday by noon. Or 1 00. Then we have to go ahead and every thing like that. Then we have to do audits before we can certify. Not just one race like in 2020. Itll be other races like state house, state senator, county commissioner, all that takes time. Then you have a runoff and the county said we want to get rid of runoffs. We dont care how you do it. Your job is to legislate. Thats what i told the General Assembly. Your job is to legislate. Come up with a solution. Theyve refused to do so thats their decision. Its on them. Hi. Thank you once again, mr. Secretary, for coming out. My name is ethan. Im majoring in international politics, im a junior, not quite from georgia but from north carolina, just down the road. My question is, in rep praition in preparation for this talk i went back and listened to the very famous perfect phone call if you will. I know. And obviously theres a lot of things that were shocking about that interaction. I was wondering if you could tell us more about the lead up to that interaction and the lead up to that, you know, fateful day in january, or late december, whenever exactly it was. What the buildup was like. How he reached out. What the communication was like prior. Everything that led up to that moment. Brad i know they wanted to talk to us for a little bit. Someone sent me a text. They said, it came from the mail, nccongressman gmail. Com, but texted it to me. It said hey, im mark meadows, your voice mail is full. Give me a call. Didnt give me a phone number so i didnt call him. I didnt primarily because we were running elections. And when i was on city council, what we were what was beaten into our heads, whenever youre doing the investigation, if you have any question, city councilmembers do not get involved in that investigation. If you have any questions, you get to the city manager. And in effect we have 20, 25 plus certified investigators. We had a lot of investigations going on about these allegations. I didnt want to enter into conversation with a lot of people as we i didnt want them or me interfering with an investigation. Let our investigators do their work. So i didnt have the number. So i didnt call. I got another one later. Gave me the call for the white house switchboard. Still didnt really know if it was them based on that email address. I thought maybe its a deepfake, you know. Maybe its borat. I just [laughter] brad im going to assume its borat and im not calling. I didnt know what good would come out of it. Finally, neil cavuto asked me some questions on fox news and i shared those data points. Apparently President Trump didnt like hearing that. So mark meadows insisted to my deputy that we have a call that day. Said if were going to do that i want my general counsell on the call, the white house had their people on the call. I dont know how many people they had on we had my general counsel, jordan, and myself. We had that conversation for about one hour and eight minutes. Just about right. Hi, secretary raffensperger. Im a government and Computer Science major in the college and im from south jersey. So you said time is not your friend. To me this screams kind of further digitalization of election process. I think a robust Voting System thats digital could do the work faster and take the burden off poll workers. So lets say, not now, but 10 years from now, we have a Voting System that works. On your personal devices. My mom uses her mac to vote, Something Like that. And lets say its secure from foreign interference. Easier said than done but lets say. You know a lot about public trust in elections. Would this ever work . Brad its interesting you said that. Because weve been sued 10 times by the Stacey Abrams camp, 10 times by the trump camp. During one of those lawsuits i met a professor from western pennsylvania, i think out of pitt cyber, one of those schools. We were talking about the next generation of what elections could look like. And he says, you know, brad, you know, this next generation is going to want to vote by their phones. Thats how theyve grown up. But were not there yet for security. But thats really where were going to be headed. Once we figure out the security element, thats where well go. But to your point, he was throwing about 2035. So 10 years down the road. That is your im going to assign you that right now. Youll probably make a billion dollars with this idea. Youll do a great job. But he says once you establish the security in that, he said its actually it could be very powerful. It puts the voter back in charge from the standpoint, up until closing at 7 00 p. M. , you can go ahead and you can vote at 7 00 a. M. Go into the office. And the boss man, the union boss or boss that owns the company, owns the whole town, you never know. Its a wonderful life, it was a great movie. So the boss says, how did you vote . Y voted for mary or you voted for bob. So you change it up until 7 00 p. M. Then just at 7 00 p. M. You change to what you want, press the send button. I had never thought about that from that standpoint. He said brad, were not there yet. So were waiting for you to develop that and get it secure to keep out any kind of deep fakes. Any kind of outside threats we could possibly have. Well probably get there at some point when people have 100 confidence in that device. Mo its interest, i remember the 2000 election. And the debacle down in florida with the hanging chads and all of that. And the response to make sure that never happened again was to move toward electron i think voting and touch screen machines went up all over the country. I was managing a campaign in florida in 2022. The first statewide election after 2000. And the Election Administrators hadnt thought about simple things, they used all the same locations but hadnt thought about, were there enough outlets. So the polls had to open late. But we moved toward electron i think voting because of an erosion of trust in the old system. Now theres a rapid move toward making sure theres a paper trail. Right . Because people have last so i think its a fascinating question and a fascinating idea but will we always kind of teeter back and forth when it comes to which system we trust . Is there a way to sort of alleviate those concerns that people just tend to have about the process . Brad perhaps. Because if we ever reach the day when we can trust 100 of all politician, i dont know if you can trust 100 of all the campaigning mores. Thats be the next thing. I trust all these people. But i dont know about theres too much to lose if you dont win a race. But were not there yet. So today were just going to make sure we have a verifiable pain every ballot. We can do 100 audit of any race in the state of georgia and in over 90 of all the states in america. Theres a paper pal lot in this upcoming election. Youll be able to audit anything. Pull up the stacks. One for this candidate, one for candidate b, one for candidate c, add them up. Verify that with the machine down on election night. Youll have the number of pieces of paper. Youll then know this was a fair, accurate election. This person won. This person lost. Mo thanks for the question. Were almost out of time, weve got two people left in line. Brad ill be quick. Good evening. Thank you for being here once again. My name is ashwat, im a freshman in the school of health studying Health Care Management and policy. Im also from georgia, im from duluth, georgia, we spoke earlier with a bunch of other georgia students. You spoke then and spoke a little bit now about your journey into politics, first as an engineer and then city council, state house and now as secretary of state. I was kind of intrigued, why did you wan to run for secretary of state . Out of all positions. Why not governor. What was special about secretary of state . Brad secretary we had electron i think voting and we needed, i thought, i wanted to move us toward that. In fact all the republicans did. I think all all the Democratic Candidates knew we needed a new system in place. I wanted a verifiable paper ballot. Wanted to gin a multistate organization to have accurate voter rolls. And i wanted to make sure only american citizens would vote in our elections. The number one concern we have right now in spite of the open borders going on nationwide, both political, you know, people on both sides of the aisle want to make sure only american citizens are voting in our elections. I think thats important. So weve ensured that. I wanted to improve professional licensing, improve corporations, you can renew your corporations for up to three years in georgia. We give People Choice in georgia. Not just in elections but also for their corporations or licensing. Its a great place for a Business Owner for your fellow diligent. Thank you. Class one. My name is joe. I am with emory undergrad. Knowing there are a number of republicans that review Donald Trumps lies regarding the election in 2020, deeply the split in the community causes weakness in the party . A house divided against itself cannot stand. It is not helpful for the Republican Party to be where they are. But we are standing on integrity so what are we supposed to do is to mark i will continue to do so. You have a book, integrity cans, i have not read it because you just handed to me. I have only heard great things from those who have read it. Public service is a good thing, politics can be as well. It is tested quit often whether or not that is true. We are all men and women for others. We do agree on everything mr. Secretary but i do believe you bring that spirit of service to your job each and every day so thank you so much for sharing some of that with us tonight. Thank you. Joining us, please keep your eye on the schedule for more. The former congressman william moderating a composition about whether or not gen z is ready to take the reins of power. Thank you so much. Arlier today, the u. S. Argument on whether former President Trump should be on primary ballot. President ial after the state supremert ruled he was ineligible ba the insurrection clause. Tonight starting it 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan, we get your reaction and the potential impact before showing thee oral argument at 8 30. You can watch out the free cspan app or online at cspan. Org. Cspan is your unfiltered view of government. We are funded by these Television Companies and more including wow. The world has changed. Today a fast reliable Internet Connection is something no one can live without so wow is there for our customers. Now more than ever it all starts with great internet. Wow supports cspan as a Public Service along with these other Television Providers giving you a front row seat to democracy. Cspanshop. Org is cspans online store. Browse through our lives collection of cspan products, apparel, books, home decor and accessories. There is something for every cspan for. Every purchase helps support our nonprofit operation. Shop now or anytime at cspanshop. Org. A healthy democracy does not just look like this. It looks like this. Americans can see democracy at work. Citizens are truly informed. Our republic thrives. Get informed straight from the source on cspan. Unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. From the Nations Capital to wherever you are. The opinion that matters the most is your own. This is what democracy looks like. Cspan, powered by cable. After the Supreme Court heard oral argument in trump versus anderson, the former president spoke to reporters outside his property in long beach. The former president was appealing a color what a Supreme Court decision he was ineligible to be on the republican primary ballot. The primary in colorado is marc. I think we are going to do very well. Maybe more than the 90s. We certainly did well in primary that did not matter. We have tremendous support from the people of our country. They hate what is happening at the border. They hate what is happening. We are left at all over the world. They hate what is happening. They want to come back. We are going to do that. If you think about it, had the results of the election been different, you would not have the ukrainian situation with russia. You would not have had an attack on is a real. You would not have inflation. You would not have china talking about taiwan. You would not have any of the problems you have today. I ran was brooklyn i left. They had money to give to hezbollah. 200 billion plus as you probably know, they control iraq. Iraq has another 300. They have a rich group of countries. As you know, iraq never should have happened. We blew out the balance. I ran has iraq. Iraq does not saying that but that is the way it is. The world is in tremendous danger. We are in danger of possibly of world war iii. We have a man who is the worst president in the history of our country is not. Going to be able to negotiate with putin. Not going to be able to negotiate with anybody. All he knows how to do is drop meaningless bombs. Excepted they kill a lot of people. Every time you see a bomb, it is another million dollars. We have peace through strength. It should not be happening. The middle east is blowing up. A lot of people are being killed. It is so unnecessary. I do say in watching the Supreme Court today i thought it was a very beautiful process. I hope democracy in this country will continue. Right now we have a tough situation with all of the radical left ideas with the weaponize station of politics. Totally illegal. They do it anyway. It has to stop. Everyone of the court cases, civil weather it is the attorney general, the district attorney. They had many meetings with the white house and the doj. Eight our meetings. That was all staged. That was a phony hoax. It is a phony hoax. Hopefully that case will be dismissed in short order. They Work Together with the Justice Department and the white house. Everyone of these cases you see comes out over the white house. It is election interference handed is very sad. I thought the presentation today was a good one. I think it was well received. Millions of people out there wanting to vote. They happen to want to vote for me or the Republican Party. To phrase it. I am the one running. We are leading. In every poll. We are leading in the local polls. We are leading in the swing staples. We are leading big in the national polls. It has been a great honor. I think the reason we have such big leads is they loved four years of us compared to the three years they have gotten with biden. You have crime. Nobody has ever seen crime like this. Now the crime is being committed by the migrants. I was wondering about that. A lot of people come out of jails. That come out of mental institutions. We dont even know where they come from. They are being dumped in from mental institutions. Many terrorists are coming to our country. They have to close the border. The president can do it by saying i want the border closed. We had the safest border in the history of our country. There has never been a country with a border like this. We are going to nevada right now. Some of you are going to be with us. And hopefully we will have a big night. A very big night. We expect to have a very big night. The Virgin Islands are very much in play today. We will be hearing about them sometime today. It is an honor to have you at maralago. It is worth a little more than 18 million. I said which cabin are we talking about. That is the kind of justice. That was a shame. They gave up so much. That maralago is worth 18 million. They had it appraised. He is supposed to be ruling on me . Who knows. Maybe he will be fair. I doubt it but maybe he will be fair. That case is 100 proven five times over. Never seen anything like it. Anyway. Its an honor to have you. I will probably see you in nevada. Thank you very much. [indiscernible] i got to just. I got the gist. He doesnt say that anymore. Let me just tell you that i heard and i washed and the one thing i will say is they kept saying about what i said right after. [inaudible] this was an insurrection if it was an insurrection, there were no guns or anything, except someone shot ashli babbitt. So sad. But there were no guns. If you look at my words, you look at my speech from the rose garden, which was very shortly after. Or you take a look at biden. Im only on truth now, but at that time i was tweeting on twitter. If you look at those five or six tweets, you will see very beautiful, very heartwarming statements. Go home. Etc. Beautiful statements. Today they said the words of trump. If you look at the words of democrats, look at schumers statement on the steps of the Supreme Court. He sounded like a mob boss. Take a look at any of them. We put together a tape of vicious, violent statements made by democrats. Nobody brings that up. Take a look at the vicious statements. I didnt do that. I said peacefully and patriotically. Peacefully and patriotically. It was the exact opposite. You should take a look at the statements that i made before and after and you will see a whole different dialogue. You mentioned chinese president xi. You would impose we want to bring business back to the u. S. They are stealing our business, they are taking our business at levels nobody has ever seen before. By doing this we bring business and manufacturing back to the United States. Which i was doing. I took in hundreds of billions of dollars from china. No president had ever taken in . 10. I had taken in hundreds of billions of dollars and jobs were coming back. I was saving Steel Companies and now they are blowing it. What a sad thing that is. We want to bring jobs back. Do you still have confidence in speaker johnson . I do have confidence in him. He is a very good man and i have great confidence in him. [indiscernible] i love that question. Thank you very much. I dont know why she continues but let her continue. We have a big one coming up in South Carolina and the polls are indicating that we are through the roof on that one. We are leading by 35 points. I think she hurts herself but i think she hurts the party and in a way it hurts the party. She did very poorly in iowa. Came in third place. Ron desantis beat her although you would not know if you listened to her speech. She has done poorly no matter where she went. The results are not in yet from the Virgin Islands i know she is doing it very hard. In nevada she lost her no name. She had a low name no name and lost. I dont know why she continues. I dont really care if she continues. I think it is bad for the party. [indiscernible] president ial immunity which we will be talking about, it is very important for a president. If the present doesnt have immunity he doesnt really have a presidency. He can be told to do things that he would never do. He can do really bad things for our country. President ial immunity is imperative. Its going to be very important. Id rather talk about that next week. But there is nothing more important to a presidency than immunity because they have to be free to make decisions without saying oh, if i do this or that, as soon as i get out of office were going to be indicted, we are going to have trouble. And the other party will do that. I think we have seen that. They have done that. They are some very bad people. You have an Opposition Party and they will do things that are very bad. If you dont have immunity, you can be black male. As a president they can say if you dont do this, this on this, we are going to indict you as soon as you leave office. You cannot allow a president to be out there without immunity. They dont have immunity. You dont have a presidency. Excuse me. You lose all form of free thought and good thought. And you probably weakened the presidency to a point that it was never supposed to be. It would be a very bad thing for our country. We will be talking about immunity in the coming weeks. How confident are you that you will be treated fairly . [indiscernible] im a believer in our country and im a believer in the Supreme Court. I listened today and i thought our arguments were very, very strong. An argument that is very important is the fact that you are leading in every race, you are leading in every state, you are leading in the country against both republican and democrat, and biden. You are leading in the country by a lot. And can you take the person that is leading everywhere and say, hey, we are not going to let you run . I think that is pretty tough to do, but i am leaving it up to the Supreme Court. Thank you all very much. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2024] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer earlier today the upreme court heard oral ar and whether former President Donald Trumphould be on colorados 2020 p ballot after the States Suprem court ruled in december that he was ineligible based on the constitutions insurrection clause under the 14th amendment. Tonight starting at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan, we will get reaction to thee and its potential impact before showing the entire oral argument at 8 30. You can also watch on the free cspan now video app or online at cspan. Org. And later this afternoon, Supreme Court Justice Elena kagan will be interviewed by federal judge Jeffrey Sutton as part of the 2024 Supreme Court Fellows Program at the library of congress in washington, d. C. We will have live coverage at 3 15 p. M. Eastern here on cspan. Announcer cspan is your unfiltered view of government. We are funded by these Television Companies and more, including comcast