Georgia Election Official Who Defied Donald Trump Echoes His Voter Fraud Fearmongering

WASHINGTON — On Wednesday, the Republican election official who defied Donald Trump in 2021 echoed Trump’s fearmongering about noncitizen voting.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger joined other Republican officials in Washington to call for states to ban undocumented immigrants from casting ballots.

“I believe that no matter where you’re elected – for president, school board, county commissioner – that we should require only Americans vote in our elections,” Raffensperger said Wednesday at the National Press Club.

“With the open border policy that we’ve had in place for so many years now, voters are concerned about noncitizen voting,” he said.

Raffensperger spoke at an event hosted by Americans for Citizen Voting, a group that advocates for states to amend their constitutions to prevent noncitizens from voting in state and local elections. Such amendments will be on the ballot in eight states this November.

Noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections, and experts say violations are rare. But several liberal cities, including ones in Maryland, Vermont and California, as well as Washington, D.C., allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Raffensperger’s D.C. press conference came as Trump and other top Republicans falsely warn that undocumented immigrants could sway November’s election in Democrats’ favor.

“Non citizen Illegal Migrants are getting the right to vote, being pushed by crooked Democrat Politicians who are not being stopped by an equally dishonest Justice Department,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in July. “That’s how they get an incapacitated moron like Joe Biden elected.”

Trump’s allies in Congress have said they won’t support a government funding bill this month unless it includes measures to block noncitizen voting, such as by requiring states to obtain proof of citizenship before registering voters. Trump backed the gambit last week, saying he would “shut down the government in a heartbeat” if Democrats won’t agree to the new measures.

There have been a few cases of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections over the years, but never enough to sway an election, and never as part of a well-organized conspiracy to support a particular candidate. That’s likely because federal voter registration forms require people to attest to their citizenship and warn of criminal penalties for falsely doing so.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) acknowledged earlier this year that the supposed threat from illegal voters has “not been something that is easily provable.”

Though Raffensperger said voters are concerned about noncitizens casting ballots, he declined to say whether they should worry when asked by HuffPost on Wednesday. Instead, he highlighted his own past work on the issue.

“I’ve been working on this long before this election cycle, long before 2020,” Raffensperger said. “I’m a common-sense American.”

He noted that a recent audit found that about 1,600 possible noncitizens tried to register to vote in Georgia from 1997 to 2022. The state blocked them all from registering, and none of them wound up casting ballots.

“If everyone had what was in place in Georgia, a lot of people would sleep better at night,” Raffensperger said.

Despite Raffensperger’s boast, Georgia’s voting procedures became a target for Trump and his allies after Raffensperger certified Trump’s loss in Georgia in the 2020 election.

The then-president infamously pressured Raffensperger to “find” the 12,000 votes he needed to undo the result. Local prosecutors later charged Trump with unlawfully soliciting Raffensperger to violate his oath of office.

Raffensperger rebuffed Trump’s demand and went on to win reelection to another four-year term as Georgia’s secretary of state in 2022. One political analyst said then that Raffensperger trumpeted his opposition to noncitizen voting as part of his reelection strategy.

“He’s not doing this because there’s a problem that needs to be solved,” Emory University political science professor Andra Gillespie told The Associated Press in 2022. “He’s doing this because he wants to try burnish his conservative bona fides with the base of voters who are going to determine whether or not he’s going to keep his job.”