Secretary Raffensperger, Are Republicans a Threat to Democracy?
The Left’s favorite friend on the Right attends a summit to smear law-abiding conservatives.
It’s a fair question, given what Brad Raffensperger’s elite Left friends think.
This week, the Georgia Secretary of State was a star panelist in a summit on threats to American democracy hosted by top Democrats and “progressives” at, of all places, Washington’s International Spy Museum. If you think elites opining about the threats regular people pose to democracy is peculiar—at a place celebrating espionage, no less—well, that probably means you’re a “fascist.”
Or so we gather from Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D), who’s weary of simply sliming his opponents as “election deniers.”
“There are fascists active in this country,” Fontes blasted. “I personally prefer calling them what they are. They are fascists. And if they don’t want to be called fascists they need to stop acting like fascists.”
We need not guess the identities of these “offenders,” either, thanks to Colorado’s far-left secretary of state, Jena Griswold. She informed us that 150 members of Congress, 6 U.S. Senators, and 6 secretaries of state—all Republicans—are “desecrating the halls of Congress as we speak.”
And not merely elected officials. According to Griswold, everyday conservatives were responsible for the (far-left illegal alien) attack on Paul Pelosi, the FBI’s fabricated plot to abduct Michigan’s Democrat governor, and the January 6th “attack” on American democracy.
Does Secretary Raffensperger agree? It’s hard to say, but his fellow attendees were amazed that he could still “go to the grocery store in peace” given the “wrath of the Trump machine” gunning for him.
We do know that Raffensperger is embarrassed by conservatives who “have trouble accepting reality” about the warped 2020 election because “misinformation and disinformation have been baked into people’s DNA.” Never mind that Democrats and their activist allies radically transformed America’s election procedures practically overnight in a bid to defeat President Trump—Raffensperger seems to think it’s Republicans, not the authoritarian Left, who are at fault.
That isn’t surprising, unfortunately, given Raffensperger’s close ties to the sham summit’s founder, the “hardcore leftist” and election lawyer David Becker. Becker’s Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) is a top advocate for vote-by-mail and ever-earlier voting. In 2020, it took $70 million from partisan mega-donor Mark Zuckerberg to juice Democrat turnout in swing states. Now it blasts conservatives as “election deniers” spreading dangerous “disinformation”—merely for questioning Democrats’ meddling in that election.
Raffensperger and CEIR go back years. Last July, CEIR celebrated him as a “Defender of Democracy” for “standing up to efforts to undermine the democratic process” in 2020 (no doubt by his fellow Republicans). Ditto Raffensperger’s chief operating officer and noted Trump critic, Gabriel Sterling.
Is that why Raffensperger refuses to pull Georgia out of Becker’s other political group, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC)?
We know that ERIC is the Left’s top tool for finding, registering, and turning out new Democratic voters—a fact it hid under the guise of cleaning up state voter rolls. In reality, ERIC expands them.
ERIC is perhaps the single biggest reason for Democrats’ recent inroads into Georgia. It’s no secret why: ERIC is a goldmine of private information on 200 million Americans—data that can make the difference between winning or losing an election. Yet only one party, the Democrats, can access it. No wonder Becker brags that ERIC is “the single most effective voter registration drive in the history of the United States.”
Public records reveal how ERIC pumps this invaluable data into CEIR, a private and unaccountable group, risking the privacy of millions and boosting Democratic turnout each election cycle. No wonder 8 states—Virginia, Florida, West Virginia, Missouri, Ohio, Louisiana, Alabama, and Iowa—have left the ERIC compact, citing legitimate concerns about ERIC’s failure to remove ineligible voters from state voter rolls as well as its refusal to reform.
The same problems apply to Georgia. When the Peach State joined ERIC in 2019, Secretary Raffensperger promised Georgians that it’d keep “our lists up-to-date” and improve “election security.”
That’s not what they got. Multiple reports published weeks before the November 2020 election showed numerous counties with more active registrations than voting-age residents, and as many as 1,000 cases of double-voting in Georgia’s primary. To date, none of them have been prosecuted. By mid-2021, the Secretary admitted that only a handful of cases had been referred to the attorney general’s office.
So far, ERIC hasn’t improved the voter rolls. Yet earlier this year Raffensperger blasted his fellow Republicans for leaving ERIC, since it’s supposedly “the best & only group capable of detecting double voting across state lines.”
What’s clear is that Georgia’s voter rolls are a disaster after 4 years of ERIC membership. Ditto in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and (until this week) my home state of Virginia, which pay hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to be in the compact. To what end?
Amazingly, Raffensperger defends ERIC—and Becker—at every opportunity, including an open letter complaining that both are “besieged by a steady stream of disinformation, designed to weaken our democracy and voters’ confidence.” Instead of addressing well-founded concerns, Raffensperger has shamefully adopted the Left’s preferred tactic: Shutting down debate.
But the tide is turning against him. Election integrity advocates across the country have realized that ERIC only benefits one group, Democrat get-out-the-vote operatives, and are urging their states to exit David Becker’s phony compact. Texas, Alaska, and other red states are considering proposals to do just that. We expect more will soon follow.
All eyes are on Georgia, where the only thing keeping you in ERIC is Brad Raffensperger. It’s time to escape ERIC—the future of free elections in America depends on it.
Heather Honey of Verity Vote contributed to this report.
