Lawsuit Uncovers How Raffensperger

Tried To Memory-Hole The Election

Law Trump’s Georgia Call Was About
BY: MARK DAVIS
JANUARY 16, 2024

Raffensperger’s general counsel sent Factcheck.org a ‘legal

analysis’ that attempted to discredit my analysis of the voter
data.
Election integrity advocates recently had a very important win when a federal district court ruled
that challenging the eligibility of thousands of voters in Georgia did not constitute “voter
intimidation.”

Back in 2020, True the Vote, Derek Somerville and I, and three other activists were all sued by
Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight organization for allegedly violating the Prohibited Acts section of the
Voting Rights Act. We had independently organized two different sets of challenges to voters with
residency issues ahead of Georgia’s 2021 U.S. Senate runoff. True the Vote’s challenges were
broader in scope than the challenges Derek and I had coordinated, which were narrowly focused
on voters who appeared to have already cast ballots with residency issues in the 2020 general
election.

When the judge ruled in favor of all the defendants in the case and found that there had “not been
any violation of Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act by any of the named Defendants,” we got to
experience “the thrill of victory,” and Fair Fight got to experience “the agony of defeat,” which was
well deserved for dragging our good names through the mud for three solid years.

While it certainly felt great to finally be exonerated, what exactly did we “win”? We may have
bloodied the noses of the schoolyard bullies, but other than walking away satisfied and knowing
that they may think twice before coming after us again, what was the point of it all?

What about all the illegal voting the challenges were meant to call attention to or possibly even
prevent? What about the challenges most counties were too scared to take up once Marc Elias
threatened them with an expensive lawsuit? Wasn’t that illegal voting the point of it all?

Once upon a time, the following language served to summarize portions of Georgia’s residency
laws on our secretary of state’s voter registration web page:

If you move outside the county in which you are registered to vote in excess of 30 days
prior to an election, you have lost your eligibility to vote in the county of your old
residence. You must register to vote in your new county of residence. You will be
assigned a new voting precinct and polling location. Remember, if you don’t register to
vote by the deadline, you cannot vote in that particular election.

You can still see it for yourself in “The Wayback Machine” if you give it time to load.
I wonder why that page vanished?

In fact, I asked Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, as well as his chief operating officer Gabe
Sterling and his general counsel Ryan Germany, about that in an email back in June 2022, but
they still haven’t gotten back to me. I wonder why that is?

Well, now I know. So let me tell you the story of “Exhibit 61.”

In May 2021, I gave nearly 35,000 voter records to our secretary of state for an investigation into
votes cast in the 2020 general election with residency issues, which his office had already agreed
to open. The analysis of the voter data I had done on or about Nov. 25, 2020, indicated those
voters had filed changes of address to an address in a different county more than 30 days before
the election, but they had apparently failed to re-register there and wound up casting ballots in
their previous counties.

When they did so, if they knowingly lied about where they lived, that would have arguably been a
felony violation of Georgia Code § 21-2-562. Some of those voters may have filed those permanent
changes of address for what was really a temporary relocation, but certainly not all of them.

Following that election, more than a third of those voters finally got around to updating their
driver’s licenses and/or voter registrations to the exact same addresses they told the U.S. Postal
Service they were moving to well before the election. When they did so, they basically provided
corroborating evidence that the change of address information they gave the USPS was accurate.

In July, WSB-TV Atlanta decided to do a story on all this after an article about it was published by
The Federalist. WSB-TV filed an open records request with the secretary of state, got a copy of the
data, and went out to interview some of those voters.

One voter candidly admitted he’d moved from Fulton to DeKalb but went back and voted in
Fulton. Another was seemingly indignant and vehemently insisted that although he had indeed
moved from Gwinnett to Fulton, he voted with a Fulton County ballot and put it in a Fulton
County drop box. Yet the absentee data and the vote history trailers both indicated he voted in his
old county. Part of me wished Channel 2 hadn’t put those voters on the spot like that, but the rest
of me wished they had interviewed a hundred more people on the list!

It was around that time I discovered the aforementioned webpage had vanished from the
secretary of state’s website.

Now, let’s fast forward to the Fair Fight v. True the Vote case. One day, our attorneys asked me
about “Exhibit 61,” which turned out to be an email Fair Fight obtained from our secretary of state
through an open records request.

That email contained a “legal analysis” that Raffensperger’s general counsel Ryan Germany had
completed for Factcheck.org, which I was previously unaware of, that attempted to discredit my
analysis of the voter data I had sent to them to investigate. This was after the secretary of state’s
office tried to hire me to work for them, twice, and that second time was less than a year earlier.

In the email, Germany, like our secretary of state, seems to like to argue that the residency issues
we have are caused by the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), and there’s not much
they can do about them. That is partially true, as all the best lies are. The NVRA is certainly a
major contributing factor to our underlying list maintenance issues, but it also does not require or
implicitly permit voters to lie about where they live when they go to vote. They make that choice
all on their own.
Then he also seemed to argue that under our own state law, Georgia Code § 21-2-224, we must
allow voters to cast ballots where they are registered, apparently even if they have moved
permanently to a new county but failed to re-register there, and their votes would then be cast in
violation of both state and federal law. Let me quote the relevant portions of that law so you can
spot his clever sophistry:

(d) Each elector who makes timely application for registration, is found eligible by the
board of registrars and placed on the official list of electors, and is not subsequently
found to be disqualified to vote shall be entitled to vote in any primary or election;
provided, however, that an elector, voting in the primary or primaries held by a single
party for the nomination of candidates to seek public offices to be filled in an election,
shall not vote in a primary held by any other party for the nomination of candidates to
seek public offices to be filled in the same such election.

And:

(h) All persons whose names appear on the list of electors placed in the possession of the
managers in each precinct and no others, except as otherwise provided in this article,
shall be allowed to deposit their ballots according to law at the precinct in which they
are registered.

Left out of the “legal analysis” for Factcheck.org was the phrase “except as otherwise provided in
this article” and the entire section requiring that electors must “not [be] subsequently found to be
disqualified to vote.”

But aren’t those precisely the voters we’re talking about here? Germany had completely twisted
the meaning of the statute, attempting to make it say the exact opposite of what it says on this
subject. Of course, the “fact” “checkers” didn’t call him out on it.

So now let me just sum this up for you. The evidence is clear, and it shows we likely
had thousands of unlawful votes cast in the 2020 election. Those same issues also happened again
in the 2021 Senate runoff, again in the 2022 general election, and will no doubt happen again in
the 2024 general election because nothing has been done about them.

Our secretary of state and his staff have repeatedly admitted that these residency
violations do occur. They admitted in that now-infamous phone call with President Trump that
they were “going through” the lists of potential residency violations, but as you can see in the
transcript, they wouldn’t put a number on them, although the Trump attorneys had asked several
times for one.

So after painting themselves into quite a corner, what did they decide to do when they realized
they couldn’t dispute the evidence or admit Trump and his attorneys were right? They apparently
decided to dispute the law itself instead.

Their position on these unlawful votes that continue to be cast in our elections is now a 180-
degree about-face from the position taken by previous secretaries of state and from the one
Raffensperger himself had on his office’s voter registration webpage for his first couple of years in
office.

That isn’t just cowardice, it’s straight-up corruption, and from a man who had the unmitigated
gall to publish a book titled Integrity Counts.

Really, Brad? It’s been nearly three years. How’s the investigation you promised coming along?

The data Brad Raffensperger has been sitting on is the same data I gave the Trump attorneys long
before that phone call ever took place. Trump was not asking Raffensperger to manufacture 11,779
unlawful votes, as some love to claim. He was asking him to investigate the unlawful votes the
president and his attorneys were already very well aware of.

Here is the sad reality: When Raffensperger ran for secretary of state, his most ardent supporters,
including me, were supporters of election integrity. Raffensperger told us exactly what we wanted
to hear, and we thought we were supporting one of our own, but all we were really getting was lip
service. When it came down to it, and integrity really did count, he chose to betray us all.

If Raffensperger had wanted to, he could have finally done the investigation our president asked
him for, and he could have disabused the entire nation of the nonsense allegations Trump has
been facing ever since. He refused to do that, and I expect he will continue to refuse because he is
more concerned with his own aspirations, which I am hearing include a campaign for governor.

Understand, I am not arguing for felony prosecutions of thousands of Georgia voters, but we
cannot fix a problem unless we admit we have a problem. And right now, our biggest problem is
Brad Raffensperger.