Over the weekend, the news emerged that President Donald Trump spent about an hour on the phone on Saturday with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), who he tried to pressure into finding some way to flip the state’s certified election outcome in his favor. Trump based his demands for this election intervention on false claims that fraud plagued the election and swung the outcome away from him in the first place, ludicrously insisting that he actually won the state by some half a million votes or so. On Monday, Gabriel Sterling — the voting systems implementation manager for the state of Georgia — held a press conference where he roundly debunked the president’s claims.
Sterling characterized the fraud claims as “ridiculous.” Raffensperger’s office has spent months tamping down on lies about the electoral process — “yet the president persists,” Sterling noted. He commented, in part, as follows:
‘We’ve seen nothing in our investigations of any of these data claims that shows there’s nearly enough ballots to change the outcome… Let’s just go to the other ridiculous claims that Dominion voting machines are somehow using fractional voting or flipping votes — again, by doing the hand tally, it shows none of that is true, not a whit. And let’s go back to the overall claims about Dominion Voting Systems in general. If you look at Wisconsin, they’re claiming: Wisconsin was stolen through Dominion voting machines. In the 14 counties in which Dominion voting machines were used in Wisconsin, the president got 59 percent of the vote… This is all easily provably false. Yet the president persists.’
Watch his comments below:
"No one is changing parts or pieces out of Dominion voting machines. That's not — I don't even know what that means. That's not a real thing. That's not happening. The president mentioned it on the call" — Gabriel Sterling pic.twitter.com/A2TZCmJVTY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 4, 2021
Sterling also addressed a claim that Trump raised during his conversation with Raffensperger suggesting that individuals were covertly switching out internal parts from Dominion voting machines to help hide evidence of fraud… or something. Sterling sounded incredulous at the breadth of the president’s persistent ineptitude, saying that his part-switching theory is “not a real thing.”
Sterling’s comments aren’t the only repudiation of the president’s lies. During a Monday appearance on ABC, Raffensperger himself noted that it “was pretty obvious very early on that we debunked every one of those theories that have been out there, but President Trump continues to believe them.” David Worley, the only Democratic member of the Georgia state Election Board, has called for a state investigation of the call, noting that it’s “a crime to solicit election fraud, and asking the secretary to change the votes is a textbook definition of election fraud.” Since there’s no legitimate evidence for Trump’s claim that fraud swung the election away from him, changing the outcome, as Trump demanded of Raffensperger, would itself require fraud.
