Georgia secretary of state: ‘We want to make sure that it's easy to vote, but hard to steal’
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is on a mission to prove to both Republicans and Democrats that his office can be trusted to run an honest election. “I'm a Republican through and through and never voted for a Democrat,” Raffensperger told Yahoo News. "[But] no matter what side you're on, we don't want anyone cheating. We want to make sure that it's easy to vote, but hard to steal. That's really important to us."
Video Transcript
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER: What I tell the candidates that are running, you best get at it. Quit looking back, and quit trying to talk about what the Secretary of State's doing. You'd better be worried about your own campaign, 'cause this is going to be a tight, competitive race.
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BRAD RAFFENSPERGER: My name's Brad Raffensperger, Secretary of State, state of Georgia. We're going to be doing 100% re-tally by hand counting all the ballots. One county, it came right in the re-tally exactly the same as what the machines had, but you can have people miscount or lose a ballot or two, and that's why you could be off a little bit, but it's just really close to what we had with the machine count.
On the race to the president, if President Trump doesn't carry Georgia, I'll be one of those folks that are sad, you know, because I'm a Republican through and through. Never voted for a Democrat, but this office runs on integrity, and that's what voters want to know is that this person is going to do his job, and that's not my job to put my thumb on the scale.
So when people say we don't do signature match, it's done twice. Once for the application, and then once when you sent the ballot in, and we actually instituted this year GBI training for election officials, and I'll continue to strengthen it, because I think that no one, no matter what side you're from, we don't want anyone cheating. We want to make sure that it's easy to vote but hard to steal. That's really important to us.
I know that we run a very methodical, lawful process here in Georgia. We have guardrails in place, and we'll make sure that those guardrails are maintained. We found some double voters back in the June primary, and it was over 1,000. We got out, and we told people, we start prosecuting those folks, and so we want people to be able to vote, but we also want to make sure that you're not trying to game the system.
There's nothing wrong with those voting machines just because one candidate comes up short. They just have to realize that it's not the machines if they didn't get the vote out, so we're making sure that at the end of the day, you won't be questioning results. It will be accurate.
We're going to run this office with integrity. Our county election officials are going to run this with integrity. Results will be accurate at the end of the day, and like I said, half the people like it. The other half won't. I get it, and I may be one of those folks with a long face after it's all said and done, but we're going to walk that line of integrity.
