Brad Raffensperger is all too familiar with attempts to subvert US democracy.
The Secretary of State for Georgia was on the receiving end of the infamous Donald Trump phone call after the 2020 election, when the then-president urged his fellow Republican to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to win the state. Raffensperger refused and death threats ensued.
Almost four years on from the unrest that followed the last presidential election, Raffensperger is again in the crosshairs of the Trump faithful, as he battles a Maga-friendly majority on the swing state’s election board who passed last-minute laws that critics claim will pave the way for post-election legal chaos, if not violent unrest.
“There are a lot of bad actors out there,” Raffensperger acknowledged as he visited a polling station in DeKalb County this week for a “security health check”, a live test of one of the big-screen voting machines that will be used across Georgia on the November 5 election. “That’s why we need people that are going to stand their ground no matter what.”
If the loudest election deniers in the Republican party are to be believed, there will be plenty for Raffensperger to resist.
He and others in the state are in a battle to prevent ‘bad actors’ from undermining the vote in Georgia, both through public education about voting systems and by rolling out security measures, including panic buttons, for poll workers and training in using antidotes for poisoning.
Simultaneously, officials at the county level “are trying to lay the groundwork to dispute the election results in Georgia if former president Trump loses,” said Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew).
Their goal is to use allegations of fraud as a “pretext” for election deniers who would then refuse to ratify the results from Georgia on January 6 2025, he added, in what “would literally be history repeating itself”.
Trump has foreshadowed such an outcome. “We have to make sure that we stop [Democrats] from cheating,” he said at an Atlanta rally in August. He then praised three of five members of the state election board as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory”.
The trio, who were appointed by Republicans, have pushed through a last-minute rule change that allows local election officials to halt the certification of election results in order to conduct a “reasonable inquiry”, without defining what reasonable might look like.
The board on Friday introduced a rule that all ballots in Georgia must be hand-counted — a move that campaigners warned was unlawful and unworkable, and could delay the election result for weeks. Raffensperger has accused the board of introducing “eleventh-hour chaos”, but he has no power to reverse their decisions.
A report published by Crew last month found that at least eight election officials in Georgia had refused to certify election results since 2020, the most of any swing state since the last cycle. They all remain in their positions.
With fewer than 50 days to go to the election, and Trump and Kamala Harris neck-and-neck in the Georgia polls, Raffensperger has embarked on a tour of more than two dozen counties to reassure the 5mn voters expected in the state that their votes will be safe.
Alongside technicians working for his office, he painstakingly demonstrates how the Dominion Voting Systems devices used in Georgia — themselves the target of conspiracy theories — are protected from hackers and illegal tampering, and how votes are digitally counted and cross referenced.
“There is a process in place and it has worked well in the past,” the 69-year-old former engineer said, in his soothing Southern drawl. He insisted local election officials have no discretion to stop certification. “When you come to the following Monday, the state law says you must, counties shall certify the election . . . that’s right there in black letter law.”
The Harris campaign, among others, is challenging the state election board’s new rules in court, with a trial set to begin next month.
Pro-democracy activists have expressed faith in the legal system to prevent attempts to delay results. Efforts to undermine the vote “will ultimately fail because of the robust protections in place and because journalists, pro-democracy advocates, and voters are watching closely,” said Justin Berger, a Georgia lawyer working for advocacy group Informing Democracy.
Crew said any election official who refuses to certify election results can expect to be sued “immediately” by well-prepared attorneys.
But Berger warned of an ominous “change of tactics” in the run-up to the 2024 vote. “It’s not so much a full-frontal assault as it is guerrilla warfare, because [the election deniers] win if they just create uncertainty . . . all it took was some manufactured uncertainty [in 2020] and we had January 6,” he said of the 2021 attack on Capitol Hill.
Although Georgia has more election deniers in crucial positions than elsewhere, they are making inroads in other swing states, including Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Marc Elias, a lawyer who successfully fought more than 60 lawsuits brought by election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 vote and now works for the Harris campaign, has warned Republicans are “building an election subversion war machine” and are “far more organised” than four years ago.
As well as installing election deniers in key election administration roles, groups who promoted conspiracy theories after the 2020 vote have attempted to disqualify tens of thousands of voters in key states, in so-called mass voter challenges, claiming the rolls are full of dead people, illegal aliens, or Americans who have moved to other states.
Even if such efforts have been largely unsuccessful, there are mounting fears of voter intimidation and the targeting of poll workers.
A recent poll found almost 30 per cent of Republicans with favourable views of Trump want armed citizens to take over as poll watchers.
In Georgia, where two poll workers were hounded out of their homes and jobs after being falsely accused of fraud by then Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani after the last election, Raffensperger’s office has handed out lanyards with panic buttons to individuals working in precincts across the state.
Election supervisors have also been trained to use Narcan, an antidote to opioid poisoning, after fentanyl-laced letters were sent to the Fulton county board of elections office.
In an attempt to shore up confidence in the voting process, Georgia has joined forces with the “Vet the Vote” campaign, which encourages veterans to become poll workers, in the hope they will be trusted by voters across the political divide.
But Raffensperger is under no illusions that such measures will convert those who believe the conspiracy theories touted by members of his own party.
“Some people just can’t believe that their candidate has come up short,” he said. “I’ve been very clear that no matter how you look at it, there was a race back in 2020 and the 227 Republican congressmen all got more votes in all of their districts than president Trump did. And in Georgia, we saw the same thing . . . People just left the top of the ticket blank.”
Despite coming under repeated attack from Trump, who claimed at the Atlanta rally that Raffensperger was doing “everything possible to make 2024 difficult for Republicans to win”, the secretary enjoys a higher approval rating in Georgia than the former president.
“People know no matter what, I’m going to do my job,” Raffensperger said, even as he lamented that his “microphone’s not big enough” to drown out voices seeking to inject doubt about the integrity of Georgia’s elections.
When asked what would happen if a large number of counties refused to certify the vote in November, Raffensperger smiled ruefully. “Then the judges will be busy.”