The fallout from Georgia’s vote-counting woes in the 2020 election is becoming increasingly captivating. In recent news, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has found himself in sizzling water for remarks in his 2021 book, ironically called Integrity Counts, about claims he made about a Republican poll worker’s testimony to Georgia lawmakers regarding Events in Atlanta during the 2020 election count.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is facing a sedate defamation suit based on false claims he made in his book “Integrity counts.” He wrote and published that a video presentation of an unsupervised vote count at State Farm Arena in Atlanta had been “manipulated,” “hacked,” “cut,” “sliced,” and “misleadingly edited and edited so that it appeared to show the exact opposite of reality,” and that it also allegedly included a “video clip that removed the clear evidence” that the law had been followed.
None of this was true. Jacki Pick, a Republican volunteer on Trump’s legal team, was the sole moderator of the video to Georgia lawmakers to prove that Republican poll watchers’ claims of an unsupervised vote count in Georgia’s largest county are true. Although she didn’t show the full 20 hours of video in her 12-minute presentation, none of what she showed was edited, chopped, chopped, or dismembered in any way.
Georgia, normally a reliably Republican state in presidential politics, gave its Electoral College votes to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The Georgia Secretary of State’s office, which is responsible for overseeing elections, seemed reluctant to investigate allegations of illegal voting and outright voter fraud:
Georgia was expecting a Republican victory by more than five points in 2016 to reduce the loss in 2020Raffensperger’s office immediately went on the defensive, rejecting requests for information from Republican activists and refusing to investigate justified allegations of illegal votingand even Falsification of Trump quotes cited in his impeachment trialYou also have an significant telephone conversation was illegally recorded They stuck with the Trump campaign, the context of the call was misrepresentedAnd immediately leaked it to the Washington PostThese and other actions have caused election integrity activists to view the entire Georgia Secretary of State’s office with suspicion and frustration.
This lawsuit could actually be the icing on the cake. A defamation suit, on top of everything else that has happened since 2020, could seriously damage Georgia voters’ faith in their system – and could motivate Republican voters to get out to vote.
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Republican campaign worker Jacki Pick is the plaintiff in the defamation suit. Her legal team has made a statement:
“Ms. Pick never asked Mr. Raffensperger to testify about the 2020 election; her only concern is restoring 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 his false statements about her, and the fact that he is more interested in drawing attention to a narrative about the 2020 election that portrays him favorably than addressing his defamatory statements from 2021 shows that he is extremely concerned that justice be done,” said Bill Whitehill, a member of her legal team.
It is still unclear what impact this controversy will have on the 2024 election, especially in Fulton County, where most of the fraud and corruption allegations are concentrated. At the time of this writing, former President Donald Trump is leading Democrat Kamala Harris by one point RealClearPolitics Average of the polls for this state. That is within the margin of error of most polls, and it is far from certain how Georgia might fare in this election. If the poll average here is correct, a difference of a few thousand votes in Atlanta, a Democratic-dominated district, could well make the difference.
