The fallout over Georgia’s problems in the 2020 election vote tally just keeps getting more interesting. In the latest news, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is in hot water over remarks in his 2021 book, ironically named “Integrity Counts,” over claims he made about a Republican election volunteer’s testimony to Georgia legislators regarding events in Atlanta in the 2020 election tally.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is facing a powerful defamation lawsuit arising from false claims he made about a Republican election volunteer in his 2021 book “Integrity Counts.” He wrote and published that a video presentation of unsupervised ballot counting at State Farm Arena in Atlanta had been “doctored,” “chopped up,” “cut,” “sliced up,” and “deceptively sliced and edited so that it appeared to show the exact opposite of reality,” allegedly including a “slice of video that had removed the clear evidence” that the law had been followed.
None of that was true. Jacki Pick, a Republican volunteer on the Trump legal team, was the sole presenter of the video to Georgia legislators to show that Republican election observers’ claims about unsupervised ballot counting in Georgia’s largest county were true. While she did not show the entire 20 hours of the video in her 12-minute presentation, nothing she showed was edited, chopped up, sliced, or diced, in any way.
Georgia, normally a reliably red state in presidential politics, gave its Electoral College votes to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The Georgia Secretary of State’s office, in charge of overseeing elections, seemed reticent to look into the charges of illegal voting and outright fraud:
Georgia went from a more than five point margin of victory for Republicans in 2016 to narrow loss in 2020. Raffensperger’s office immediately went into a defensive posture, rejecting information requests from Republican activists, refusing to investigate legitimate claims of illegal voting, and even fabricating Trump quotes that were cited in his impeachment. They also illegally recorded a key phone call they held with the Trump campaign, mischaracterized the context of the call, and immediately leaked it to the Washington Post. These and other actions have led election integrity activists to view the entire Georgia Secretary of State office with suspicion and frustration.
This lawsuit may indeed be the icing on the cake. A defamation suit, on top of everything else that has gone on since 2020, could seriously impair Georgia voters’ confidence in their system — and it may provide motivation for Republican voters to turn out.
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The Republican election volunteer, Jacki Pick, is the plaintiff in the defamation suit. Her legal team has made a statement:
“Ms. Pick never once asked Mr. Raffensperger to make statements regarding the 2020 election; her only concern is in repairing her damaged reputation caused by false statements made by Mr. Raffensperger in 2021, a full year later. Ms. Pick will hold Mr. Raffensperger accountable for making false statements about her, and the fact he’s more interested in diverting attention to a 2020 election narrative that portrays him favorably and away from addressing his 2021 defamatory statements shows he is extremely concerned that justice will be served,” said Bill Whitehill, a member of her legal team.
It is as yet unclear what, if any, impact this controversy will have on the 2024 election, especially in Fulton County, where most of the allegations of fraud and corruption are centered. As of this writing, former President Donald Trump is leading Democrat Kamala Harris by one point in the RealClearPolitics average of polling for that state. That’s within the margin of error for most polls, and it’s far from certain which way Georgia might go in this election. If the polling average here is accurate, the difference of a few thousand votes in Atlanta, a Democrat-dominated jurisdiction, may well tell the tale.
