New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Georgia’s Raffensperger brings upbeat message to CT
What better place to be in the early evening before Biden’s State of the Union address than a talk by Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who spurned former President Donald Trump’s effort to hijack the 2020 election?
The state of the vote, and by extension the state of democracy, was on everyone’s mind as the softspoken engineer and entrepreneur-turned politician spoke in West Hartford Tuesday, ahead of a visit to Yale on Wednesday.
Raffensperger delivered an upbeat view — surprisingly considering all he endured as a conservative Republican who voted for Trump in 2016 and again in 2020 before famously telling the president in a recorded phone call that, no, he would not tip the scales in a razorthin election recount.
“We are actually very good at running elections in America. We have worked on a lot of the processes and in Georgia we have honest and fair elections,” he told me after an hourlong talk. “You look at what we have nationwide, we have different laws in different places but the will of the people is heard...This system works with integrity, with accuracy and with verified results.”
Raffensperger was hosted at the Hartford Golf Club by Dr. Larry Lazor, the moderate Republican who challenged Rep. John B. Larson, D-1st District, for Congress in November. He criticized Democrats and Republicans alike who have undermined faith in elections.
“We’ve been pushing back the myth on stolen elections and voter suppression,” he told the audience. “I think the most important thing is that you have trust in the process. It’s really harmful for society when people run an election and they lose fair and square by 55,000 votes like Stacey Abrams did, it’s not helpful for society, it starts tearing our social fabric apart.”
The 2020 presidential election “ramped up to a whole different level. And that just created even more social stresses,” said Raffensperger, who wrote a book in 2021, “Integrity Counts.”
Raffensperger isn’t looking to reform the parties toward moderate positions necessarily; he is looking to return civility to the politics.
“Both political parties are at the end of their cycles,” he said, looking for defining leaders like former President Ronald Reagan, who combined character and a cause.
If Raffensperger mentioned Trump by name during the evening, I didn’t hear it, nor did my fellow political reporter, Susan Raff of Channel 3 Eyewitness News WFSB.
The 2022 elections brought more calm, as most of the 2020 election deniers vying for their states’ top elections positions across the country lost their races.
So, what is the state of the vote? I asked folks in the room, starting with Dominic Rapini, the Branford Republican who was nominated by the GOP for secretary of the state — and was said by CNN to be one of those 2020 election deniers.
Rapini told me that was false — “I think he lost,” Rapini said of Trump. “I asked a lot of questions around his election...We can’t ignore all we learned in 2020.”
As for the state of elections, Rapini is less upbeat than Raffensperger. “They’re sloppy,” he said, adding, “In Connecticut I think we have a bevy of crazy, far-left issues we have to defend against.”
He named voting rights by incarcerated people and by non-citizens and by people as young as age 16.
Then there’s the proposed bill in Connecticut — this is not a joke — that would require registered voters to actually vote, or provide a reason why they failed to cast a ballot if asked by a town official, or face a fine.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Ben Proto, the state Republican chairman, who was at Raffensperger’s talk. “You might think they’re all idiots, I don’t want to vote for any of them.”
But despite ideas such as that one, which apparently is headed for a public hearing (if you don’t testify you could be fined), Proto is optimistic about the state of voting. “In Connecticut I think our voting is good,” he said. “We have a full paper system. For the most part voting in Connecticut is safe and secure.”
He’d like to see new machines, not connected to the internet; and no more than ten days of early voting, a decision lawmakers are now debating. Georgia has 17 days of early voting, which Raffensperger defended despite the cost for small counties.
Raffensperger described the harassment he and his wife faced after the recording of him spurning Trump went public.
“She was up in the great Smokies and she got a text…and it says, ‘Tell Brad he needs to resign, it’s going to get rough,’ he said. “It just started getting kind of really wild and I started getting texts…I got like physical threats but Patricia got just gutter, sexualized threats and stuff like that. And then finally we had a couple of Oath Keepers that were driving by our place.”
By then he and his family had police protection. But Georgia got over it, he said.
He described his office trying to put out facts but being swamped by “some people that have upwards of 75 million Twitter followers.” Gee, was he talking about Ellen DeGeneres?
“I think right now America is tired of the screaming and hollering,” he said, a couple of hours before Biden goaded Republicans into heckling him at the State of the Union address. Hey, it’s a slow evolution.
Lazor, the host, blamed both sides for “throwing out falsehoods.”
I asked Raffensperger whether he’d vote for Trump again. “I’m going to be looking for someone with integrity, character, honesty, ability to engage in civil discourse, really focusing on making America a better place to live,” he responded.
Is that Trump? “Everyone gets to make these decisions, that’s the beautiful thing about America.”