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