Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger expressed his dismay with President Joe Biden’s recent rhetoric surrounding the 2022 midterms and election integrity more generally in an interview with National Review on Thursday.
“Between his speech last week here in Georgia, and his remarks last night, President Biden has surrendered any credibility he had on the integrity of America’s elections,” said Raffensperger.
In a speech delivered last week in Atlanta, Biden compared opponents of his election reform legislation to Confederate president Jefferson Davis, segregationist governor George Wallace, and Bull Connor, the Birmingham commissioner of public safety who oversaw a brutal crackdown on civil rights protesters.
Then on Wednesday, the president suggested that the 2022 midterms might not be fair or legitimate if said legislation failed to pass the Senate, which it did later that evening.
According to Raffensperger, who faces a tough primary fight after his refusal to assist former president Donald Trump in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Biden “confirmed out loud what I’ve been saying for years, Democrats are the party of stolen election claims. And this has been going on since 2000, 2004.”
“Whether it’s Joe Biden or it’s Stacey Abrams, Democrats have made it clear that the only election that they’ll ever trust is the ones that they went in,” he added.
Raffensperger has been outspoken in his defense of S.B. 202, the state law tweaking Georgia’s election procedures. President Biden has characterized the bill as “Jim Crow 2.0” and his choice of Atlanta as the site of his voting rights speech last week was reflective of his party’s message that Georgia is ground zero for the fight against Republican efforts to suppress the votes of black Americans. But black voter participation — both in absolute terms and relative to their share of the state’s total population — has steadily increased since 1996, a National Review analysis found.
“I don’t share the concerns that he does, because his idea is that our president will only call an election legitimate if the Democrats are successful in banning photo ID and H.R. 1 and H.R. 4, and there going to mandate ballot harvesting,” said Raffensperger — who also objects to banning voter ID requirements — while making the case against the legislation rejected by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, but still championed by Biden.
“Georgia has been recognized number one for election integrity,” noted Raffensperger, referring to a recent report from the Heritage Foundation. “We’re recognized for our accessibility, but we’re also recognized that we have appropriate guardrails, so everyone knows that we have safe and secure elections — we have struck the proper balance,” he continued.
The embattled secretary of state called it “unfortunate” that the last two presidents, representing both major parties, have cast doubt on the legitimacy of recent elections. “We need to lean back into [the Constitution] instead of leaning into the whims of a person that holds an office for short periods of time.”
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