EXCLUSIVE — Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger hit back against President Joe Biden’s criticism of the state’s voting law, saying the president offered little more than “cheap political rhetoric.”
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both delivered remarks in Atlanta on Tuesday, where the president likened opponents of the For the People and John Lewis Voting Rights acts to George Wallace, Bull Connor, and a slew of other racists and segregationists.
Raffensperger, who alongside Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp became frequent targets of former President Donald Trump for not cooperating with his attempts to overturn the 2020 general election results, claimed in an interview with the Washington Examiner that the Democrats’ legislation will not only make it harder for states to carry out safe and secure elections but also further polarize the public on the issue.
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“There are simple things that they could do [to address the issue], but what he came with was living in the past,” Raffensperger stated. “[Biden] doesn’t understand that Georgia is not the same state today as it was in 1950, in 1960. We’re the eighth-largest state in the country. We have all sorts of Fortune 500 companies here. We’re dynamic. We’re growing, lowest unemployment, No. 1 place to do business. We are recognized No. 1 for election integrity.”
“We have a lot of success to talk about, and he wants to take us back in the past to a reality that doesn’t exist anymore,” Raffensperger added.
Raffensperger and Kemp were raised up by the media in late 2020 as Republicans willing to stand up to Trump’s claims that the election was marred by widespread voter fraud, yet they were heartily criticized by the Left after Kemp signed SB 202 into law in March of 2021, citing the need to fight fraud.
Furthermore, Raffensperger proposed Tuesday morning the following four federal reforms designed to safeguard election integrity across the country:
- Amend the U.S. Constitution to bar non-American citizens from voting in local or national elections.
- Pass nationwide voter ID legislation.
- Pass a nationwide ban on ballot harvesting.
- Reform the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to shorten the “blackout” window regulating state maintenance of voter rolls.
Pressed by the Washington Examiner, Raffensperger conceded that what Republicans refer to as “election security” and Democrats call “voting rights” are really “two sides of the same coin” and that the parties are “talking past each other” to the detriment of finding a solution.
“I think, right now, we need calm, rational, reasoned voices when they’re looking at policy. I’ll be on the right side of the aisle, obviously, with that, but I’ll sit down with anyone on the left side that wants to have a rational, reasoned conversation on the best policies moving forward on,” he added.
Raffensperger suggested that there could be a bipartisan accord on the issue if politicians engineered election security redundancies by pulling from both conservative and liberal proposals.
“People need to understand in Georgia, we have the appropriate, I think, almost the perfect balance of accessibility,” he continued. “Because we have photo ID, we allow you to have all three forms of voting: no-excuse absentee voting, you have to request the ballot, [and] we have signature match and photo ID on that; you show up to vote, we have photo ID for that; you show up on Election Day, we also have that. So we give people lots of opportunity, which has led to record turnout and record registration. I think we’ve really struck the appropriate balance.”
Raffensperger also endorsed launching a new bipartisan presidential commission, similar to 2005’s Carter-Baker Commission, to make new federal recommendations on the issue and even suggested former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice serve as the Republican co-chair.
Raffensperger did not say if any Biden administration officials or congressional Democrats had made contact with Georgia state officials to discuss voting rights and election security but said he still believed it was possible to “grind hard” and find a bipartisan solution.
“We are supposed to really work together. It is stressful, but we have to deal with these issues and come at it, if possible, from our different viewpoints to see if we can find the consensus,” he stated. “A constitutional republic that we have in the United States of America is really a consensus republic. It’s not trying to keep the other one down just because you have a simple majority. It’s hearing what the minority party has to say, bringing them in, and seeing what you can do to find some consensus.”
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“I think that we should look at what can we do to move that forward,” Raffensperger said in closing. “I think leadership on both sides need to make that instead of trying to score cheap political points. Do the hard work and have the discussions, go out to dinner, and learn what it takes to actually do something for the American people. If it needs to be fixed, fix it, and that’s what Americans are tired of: People talk a lot, but no one does anything.”
