During an appearance on The Sunday Show with host Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC this weekend, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) went after false claims about the integrity of elections in Georgia and the United States at-large. To be sure, Raffensperger did (somewhat disingenuously) loop voting rights activist and one-time Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams into his complaints about those challenging election results, but he also singled out Trump, and his comments apply to the former president, too.
After Abrams lost to Republican Brian Kemp in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, she raised concerns about the conducting of the election — but her concerns were based in something entirely different than the nonsensical Trump claims. She did not allege that the results, as reported, had somehow been concocted out of thin air. Instead, she observed that voter suppression had an outsized impact on the race — something much less easily disputed than Trump’s claims of election-rigging. Raffensperger’s broader observations regarding the security of elections still apply — he called out Trump for pushing claims that were not “supported by the facts.”
As Raffensperger put it on MSNBC:
‘We have safe and secure elections. It’s not helpful for either party, I think either party needs to look at what they’re saying and then just realize that when you lose, you lose. Accept the facts that you have lost and move on. If you want to run again, by all means, but the accept the results.’
Watch Raffensperger below:
.@GaSecofState tells @CapehartJ, “We have safe and secure elections. It’s not helpful for either party, I think either party needs to look at what they’re saying and just realize that when you lose, you lose. Accept the facts that you have lost and move on.” #SundayShow pic.twitter.com/BMUT36chnN
— The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart (@TheSundayShow) November 7, 2021
Separately, Raffensperger has outlined troubling allegations against Trump in a newly available book. A call between then-President Trump and Raffensperger in January of this year was already known to the public — at the time, Trump tried to pressure Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to flip the state, which Biden won. Changing that outcome would have required fraudulently meddling with the results. On the call, Trump told Raffensperger at one point, in reference to the handling of the election: “When you talk about no criminality, I think it’s very dangerous for you to say that” — and the Georgia official says he took the then-president’s remark as a threat. He wrote that he “felt then—and still believe today—that this was a threat. Others obviously thought so, too, because some of Trump’s more radical followers have responded as if it was their duty to carry out this threat.” Atlanta-area District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating the matter.
