Raffensperger claims Democrats barred him from testifying during election integrity hearing

PARTIES BATTLE OVER ‘JIM CROW’ LABEL AHEAD OF SENATE HEARING ON NEW GEORGIA VOTING LAW

The hearing pertains to the Georgia election bill, which Gov. Brian Kemp signed March 25. The omnibus bill makes a multitude of changes to the way the state conducts its elections, including changes to voter identification requirements, altering mail-in voting, and reducing the time period between an election and a subsequent runoff.

“After happily quoting my office when it suited their political purposes, radical liberals in the Senate majority have suddenly decided they don’t want to hear the truth about the election law in Georgia,” Raffensperger said. “Instead, they are featuring a senator who used a flagrant lie about the bill to fundraise and a politician who has been alleging a stolen election without evidence for years. If the Senate majority wanted truth, they would have invited me to speak it instead of putting on this blatantly partisan sideshow.”

A spokesperson for committee Chairman Dick Durbin pushed back on Raffensperger’s claim that it was the GOP who had requested his attendance and that the GOP didn’t put him on the witness list until the last minute.

“Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have gone above and beyond what is required by the rules of this committee,” Emily Hampsten told the Washington Examiner. “We provided the minority two weeks advance notice of this hearing — twice as long as the rules require. As a result, the minority had ample time to determine their witnesses for this hearing. Republicans selected their witnesses, but then, yesterday afternoon, less than 24 hours before the hearing was set to begin, Republican staff requested an additional witness, the Georgia secretary of state.”

“Republican staff told us that Secretary Raffensperger had reached out to them asking to testify, contrary to Secretary Raffensperger’s claim that he was invited to testify by the Senate minority staff last week,” she added. “This request was made despite the fact that the deadline for submission of testimony had passed nearly three hours earlier. We cannot have one set of rules when Republicans are in the majority and another set of rules when Democrats are in the majority.”

Ossoff’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did spokespeople for the Senate Judiciary minority.

Raffensperger would have been in attendance “to sound the alarm. Over an all too common willingness to spread disinformation about election laws for partisan gain,” he said in his prepared testimony.

He said former President Donald Trump urged him, among others, to change the outcome of the election and said, “We were lionized by media outlets and praised by individuals on the left for our willingness to stand up for truth in the face of unprecedented pressure. Because you believed me after November, I ask that you believe me again now. I told the truth then when it was politically inconvenient for me, and I am telling it now, even if it may be politically inconvenient for some of you.”

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Raffensperger noted Kemp’s 2018 victory over Stacey Abrams, the Peach State’s former Georgia House of Representatives minority leader, who claimed Kemp engaged in voter suppression to win. Abrams was one of the people who did testify at the hearing.

The secretary of state has said he supports some aspects of the bill, while disliking others.

One measure removed the secretary of state as the chairman of the powerful state election board and replaced him or her with an appointee to be selected by the state Legislature, which he called “retribution” for not capitulating to the former president.

Trump has since endorsed a Republican challenger, one who has repeated the president’s claims of fraud.