Brad Raffensperger is rattling off statistics while we wait. It’s just after 4:00 P.M. on Tuesday, May 21, and the Georgia secretary of state is standing outside a small conference room in an underground bunker on the east side of Atlanta, where he and his staff gather on election days. A couple dozen workers are spread around an open seating area, quietly fielding phone calls and staring at their computer monitors. With its fluorescent lights and gray carpet, the place has the muted feel of a regional sales office. The secretary, though, is energized. As the official in charge of overseeing elections in his state, Raffensperger is always ready to dive into the details.
Today is a statewide primary, and more than seven hundred thousand of his fellow citizens will show up to cast a ballot at Georgia’s roughly twenty-three hundred polling sites, on top of the nearly six hundred thousand who voted early in person or by absentee ballot. For this election alone, says Raffensperger, the state had to produce about nine thousand different ballot styles to cover every local race and precinct. On one wall of the command center, big screens show real-time updates on the percentage of polling places reporting results, voter turnout, and voter wait time, which is averaging less than a minute—a point of pride for the sixty-nine-year-old Raffensperger. A successful structural engineer before entering politics, he’s all about optimizing systems.
Right now he’s eager to demonstrate his latest innovation. It’s a method his team devised to help test and prove the reliability of the state’s elections—a process called “parallel monitoring.” Inside the conference room, specialists are preparing to run a series of accuracy tests on five Dominion voting machines, collected from counties randomly selected around the state. Working from a set of test ballots, they’re replicating the votes on each device to make sure the machines render them faithfully from touch screen to paper ballot.
This is only the second time the assessment has been conducted on voting machines during an election—both times in Georgia. Raffensperger’s team debuted the parallel-monitoring process a couple months earlier, for the presidential primaries in March. “It’s never been done in any other location in America, the best we can tell,” he says.
His mission is straightforward, as he sees it. “If you’re a voter in this state, I want you to have 100 percent confidence in the outcome of our elections,” says Raffensperger, who’s clad in his typical political uniform of navy suit, blue button-down, red tie, and rimless glasses. “That’s always the goal.”
He pauses, before adding with ironic understatement: “Then we had someone come up short and put out some disinformation.”
That someone was none other than former president Donald J. Trump, after his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Rather than concede, of course, Trump spent the weeks after Election Day attempting to pressure key officials around the country to certify him as the winner. Raffensperger was one of the main targets of his ire.
Trump was particularly vexed by his upset loss in Georgia, a reliably Republican state for more than two decades. He claimed repeatedly that he was the rightful winner there, despite all evidence to the contrary, and spent weeks criticizing Raffensperger and other officials in the state for not taking action to change the outcome. On December 31, 2020, he filed Trump v. Kemp and Raffensperger, a lawsuit against Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, and Raffensperger demanding that they decertify the results.
Then came perhaps the most infamous conference call in U.S. history, on January 2, 2021—when Trump dialed up Raffensperger to pressure him directly. (The former president later defended the call as “perfect.”)
As Raffensperger recounts in his book, Integrity Counts, it was a Saturday, and he took the call while sitting at his kitchen counter with his wife, Tricia. The secretary of state put his mobile phone on speaker mode and listened as Trump pressed him to “find 11,780 votes”—the number needed to win Georgia and its sixteen electoral votes. A self-described lifelong conservative Republican who’d voted for Trump, Raffensperger listened politely but rebuffed him. At that point, the state had already overseen two recounts—including a hand count of the paper ballots of the state’s roughly five million votes—and the results were clear: Joe Biden had won. Raffensperger had no choice but to certify Biden as the winner. (“Well, Mr. President,” he replied at one point, “the challenge you have is that the data you have is wrong.”)
Andrew Hetherington
Suddenly he was in the national spotlight in a way that he never could have imagined. Along with principled officials in other key battleground states, Raffensperger was hailed as a hero by Democrats and election-integrity advocates—one of the courageous few officials who kept Trump from strong-arming the election away from Biden.
But he also became a target for Trump’s right-wing supporters, including many of Raffensperger’s fellow Republicans in Georgia. He was accused of covering up election fraud in favor of Biden. (Never mind the fact that he had previously been an object of criticism from Democrats who claimed his policies were leading to voter suppression that favored Republicans.) Georgia’s two Republican U.S. senators at the time, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, called on him to resign. He and his family faced death threats.
“I understood how polarized America was,” says Raffensperger. “I just didn’t expect it to go to the level that it did.” In the face of it all, he drew on his faith and personal strength, forged through profound tragedy.
Four years later, we’re getting ready to run it all back. Trump is set to square off against Biden in a presidential rematch that once again projects to be a tight race, including, perhaps, in Georgia (though Biden’s alarmingly shaky performance when the two met for a televised debate in June caused speculation that Biden might drop out and another Democrat would step up to take on Trump). And Raffensperger, who was reelected to his post in 2022, will once again be overseeing the election in the state. Trump was indicted last year on charges of racketeering and fraud for his efforts to interfere in the election, along with eighteen other defendants, four of whom have already pleaded guilty. (Trump’s attorneys have argued that Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, who brought the charges, should be disqualified after it came to light that she was in a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor who was working on the case and has since stepped down.) The case is unlikely to come to trial before voting starts this fall.
If anything, the pressure and the scrutiny will be more intense for election officials like Raffensperger this time around. Trump has hinted at a vengeance campaign against perceived enemies if he returns to the White House and has already suggested that he might not accept the results of the 2024 election if he doesn’t feel they’re “fair”—a proactive stance on election denialism being echoed by a chorus of national Republican leaders. In Georgia, meanwhile, a contingent of state Republicans have spent the past few years working to dilute Raffensperger’s authority as the final word on election results.
All of which raises a fundamental question: If the presidential vote comes down to a fine margin in Georgia in November, if partisan figures are spreading disinformation to sow chaos and the pressure is mounting, will Raffensperger be able to hold the line again and follow the numbers, no matter which way they fall?
Raffensperger’s strategy for navigating the extremes of partisan politics could probably be summarized in two words: unrelenting reasonableness. Tall and solidly built, he is soft-spoken but confident and animated in conversation. He leans on facts without talking down to his audience. “My job is to give people the truth, and I try to do that respectfully,” he says.
When people on the Right challenge the idea that Trump could have lost to Biden in Georgia, Raffensperger offers data points. He might mention, for example, that some 27,500 Republicans who voted down the ballot in 2020 skipped the top of the ticket and didn’t place a vote for president—more than enough votes to explain Biden’s margin of victory in the state.
“I try to use words that are more calming than spinning people up,” he says with a wry smile. “There’s enough people spinning people up.”
Staying even-keeled hasn’t always been easy over the past few years. Angry Trump supporters found his wife’s cell number and sent her threatening messages. People they knew pulled away from him and his family. In 2021, Republicans in the state legislature passed an election-reform bill, SB 202, the so-called Election Integrity Act, that removed Raffensperger as chair of the State Election Board, a traditional post for the secretary of state. The law also gives the Election Board, with members appointed by the legislature, the power to take over county boards of elections if the state board determines that the county officials are not performing their duties well. That has raised concern on the Left that the board could use its authority to target largely Democratic counties, like Fulton County, where Atlanta is located. Georgia’s Republican leadership has appointed three new members this year to the five-member state board, which is now made up of four Republicans and one Democrat.
Another much-mocked provision in the Election Integrity Act prohibits giving food and water to voters who are waiting in line. Democrats pointed to this as a measure designed to suppress turnout; lines at voting sites are often found to be longer in counties that lean Democratic. The law was lampooned earlier this year in an episode of the HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm in which the show’s creator and star, Larry David, is arrested while on a visit to Georgia for giving a bottle of water to his friend Leon’s aunt, who was standing in line at a voting site. Raffensperger responded by penning an intentionally comedic letter to David sympathizing with his TV “arrest” but offering no help because “while my powers as secretary of state to perform miracles are often overstated, I’m afraid I lack the authority to grant a pardon—even if you call me to ask for one.”
When Raffensperger was up for reelection in 2022, Trump endorsed his rival in the Republican primary, Jody Hice, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia who had seconded Trump’s false claims of fraud and voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Raffensperger held off Hice in the primary, boosted in part by Democrats crossing over to vote for him in the open primary, and cruised to victory over his Democratic opponent by nine percentage points in the general election—the widest margin of victory in any race for statewide office in Georgia that year. “He’s been able to withstand some of the political fires, especially with Donald Trump gunning for him in the 2022 cycle,” says Andra Gillespie, a political-science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “That said, he’s still facing some big challenges.”
It would be hard to blame Raffensperger if he’d decided to opt out and not run for a second term in 2022. He and Tricia, who’ve been together since their senior year of high school, are past the traditional retirement age and have grandchildren to dote on. And he’s financially secure after a successful business career as the founder and CEO of his own contracting firm.
So why subject himself to the stress of overseeing another contested election? Why take what a lot of people would view as a thankless job, knowing that he already has a target on his back from many in his own party?
Raffensperger answers by holding up his phone and showing a photo of a U.S. military cemetery in Florence, Italy, that he took on a recent trip. He leans forward across the desk in the conference room where we’re sitting and looks at me intently.
“For these people,” he says. “People that gave their life fighting for our freedom. Anyone that has ever served our U.S. military and then lost their life, how could you dishonor their sacrifice by not just doing your job? If people don’t have the guts to do their job, they’re not worthy to hold office. You’ve got to do what’s right. You honor the founders. You honor anyone who has ever fought, anyone who’s ever died. You’ve just got to boil it down to that. You’re going to internalize that. And I have. I love this country, and I’ll fight to make sure we have honest and fair elections as I hold this office. I think it’s really important. It’s as simple as that.”
Ask Raffensperger about his roots as a Republican and he discusses his own entrepreneurial drive from a young age. He grew up as one of five kids and spent his early years in a small town called Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia. His father was an engineer who’d enlisted in the Navy right out of high school in 1944, and his parents emphasized the value of hard work. Raffensperger says his early jobs, starting at age eight, included selling potato chips door-to-door in his apartment complex, delivering newspapers, collecting and reselling used golf balls, and picking up rocks on a sod farm for a dollar an hour.
“I think America’s a land of opportunity,” he says. “It’s about freedom, and we all have the same chance. That’s what you want—everyone to have an equal opportunity. And I think a lot of that is hard work.”
As an adult, Raffensperger followed his aptitude for math and his father’s example by studying engineering. He and Tricia moved to Atlanta in 1982 for his job with a construction company and put down roots. As parents of young children, they bought a struggling day-care business, which Tricia ran and was able to turn around. They sold it a few years later for a profit. And in 1987, Raffensperger cofounded his own specialty contracting and engineering design company, doing business in dozens of states.
He was fifty-six when he made his first foray into politics. In 2010, he ran for an open seat on the city council in Johns Creek, the suburb north of Atlanta where he lives. He won and served for three years. Then, in 2014, he ran for an open seat in the Georgia House of Representatives and won that race in a runoff. Raffensperger was able to do double duty in the legislature and at his company by working long hours. But he’d caught the bug for politics and began to turn over more responsibility at work to Kyle, the middle of his three sons. Raffensperger launched his bid for secretary of state in 2018.
While he was campaigning, on April 3, 2018, he and Tricia got the news that their oldest son, Brenton, had died of a fentanyl overdose. Brenton had been battling addiction since he was fifteen and had done time in prison and in rehab. Raffensperger took a few weeks off to grieve before getting back on the campaign trail. When he was under attack after the 2020 election, he writes in his book, his family’s motto was “I’ve been through worse.”
When Raffensperger was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2019, he inherited at least nine lawsuits filed against the state by left-leaning groups contesting the results of the 2018 gubernatorial election—in which the Republican, Brian Kemp, had defeated the Democrat, Stacey Abrams—on various grounds. None of them were successful in court. The most high-profile of the lawsuits was filed by Abrams through an organization she founded called Fair Fight Action, and it contained a range of allegations, including voters being purged from the rolls and the possibility that voting machines had been hacked. Eventually, Raffensperger and the state won the case, and Abrams didn’t appeal.
“We pushed back on that,” says Raffensperger, “because we had just had a gubernatorial race with over four million people—record turnout. We had at the time sixteen days of early voting. We had no-excuse absentee voting. We had photo IDs for the in-person voting that we did have. And we also had automated voter registration, which [then] Secretary of State Brian Kemp had put into place. So it was never easier to vote, but we had the proper balance of accessibility with security.”
Critics cite Georgia’s photo ID requirement as a policy designed for voter suppression with a lineage that can be traced back to the Jim Crow era. Raffensperger argues that it is about eliminating subjectivity in the process and avoiding fraud to boost confidence in the results. “When I ran in 2018, I said we need to have objective criteria. We need to go with photo ID. And that’s what we’ve done with the driver’s license,” says Raffensperger. “We’ve gone with objectivity, and that’s in my wheelhouse as a business owner, as an engineer. If we can do that, it’s tough to argue with the facts.”
While Abrams’s suit didn’t succeed in the courts, Raffensperger points out in his book that her claims that the 2018 election in Georgia wasn’t fair were taken up by a litany of top Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, the latter of whom said, while campaigning in June 2019, that “voter suppression is the reason Stacey Abrams isn’t governor right now.”
From Raffensperger’s point of view, the Democrats were undermining faith in the electoral process without hard evidence, in much the same way that Trump did in 2020. (One notable difference: Abrams’s supporters made no effort to storm the Georgia State Capitol.)
“You have to understand Democrats have the same issue,” says Raffensperger now. “It’s just that they won the last [presidential] election. So that’s why they seem like they’re just all playing nice in the sandbox. But they’ve got people out there that if, all of a sudden, they start losing states that they thought they were going to win, I think you’ll see them becoming”—he pauses and slows down for dramatic effect—“very activated.”
Our democracy runs on a basic assumption: Our elections are legitimate, and the results can be trusted. Trump’s repeated and ongoing false claims that the 2020 election was stolen have put a serious dent in that trust. And in that context, small hiccups that arise here and there in a vast, decentralized, logistical endeavor like a national election—a voting precinct opens late because someone forgot a key, for example, or a voting machine malfunctions—can be spun into big conspiracies by people who see an opportunity to sow confusion. It’s a phenomenon that election-integrity experts call “manufactured chaos.”
Rachel Orey, a senior associate director of the Bipartisan Policy Center Elections Project, expresses complete confidence that administrators across the country at both the state and local levels are fully prepared to administer a secure, accessible, trustworthy election in November. But whether the public will accept that is another question.
“There’s this concept of trust versus trustworthiness,” says Orey. “If you’re in election administration, you know that we have secure elections. Whether or not voters trust that we have secure elections is an entirely different process.”
In particular, Orey worries about the certification step in the election process, in which officials sign off on results; Orey says this is vulnerable to being taken out of context. “The problem with certification is, though it is ceremonial, the public doesn’t know that. So if there’s a lot of coverage saying that, you know, county officials are refusing to certify votes in this state, citing irregularities or citing fraud, and then that starts playing out in the courts, that immediately gives those claims a perceived degree of credibility, even if they’re not credible at all.”
The pressure on Raffensperger is only growing more extreme, particularly from the Trump supporters who have effectively taken over leadership of Georgia’s Republican party at the grassroots level. In January, Republicans in the state senate passed a bill that would give Georgia’s State Election Board the legal power to investigate Raffensperger’s handling of elections. His attorneys called the move a clear violation of the Georgia state constitution, and the bill ultimately fizzled. But the state’s MAGA Republicans have won other victories in their campaign “election integrity” drive. In May, the governor signed a Republican-driven law that could make it easier to remove people from the voting rolls in Georgia through challenges to voter eligibility—seen by many as a move to suppress Democratic votes. There is also a long-running lawsuit by election-integrity activists claiming that Georgia’s election process is unconstitutional because its voting machines are vulnerable to tampering, and that the state should use only paper ballots.
Raffensperger bristles at the idea that there are ongoing questions of integrity in the state’s oversight of elections. “I would just like to point out that we just came out of a very successful 2022 election,” he says. “And not a single candidate contested their elections. And so, a lot of these folks, they want to pretend we just woke up and this is 2020 all over again. The reality is we just had a well-run, successful 2022 election, and they want us to forget about that.”
Meanwhile, he and his team continue to do the one thing they can control in the run-up to this November: prepare. That includes regional “tabletop” exercises with election directors, sheriffs, and other officials to discuss security threats or anything that could go wrong ahead of election days and during audits after. His team has conducted “health checks” of every one of the state’s 159 counties, including randomized testing of equipment. And now there’s the parallel monitoring.
“It’s a subset of a subset that has an agenda,” says Raffensperger. He has faith that with enough transparency, he can persuade the majority of voters what they need to believe: “We have fair, accurate, honest elections here in Georgia.”
One subject on which Raffensperger doesn’t offer visibility is whether he plans to vote again for his party’s nominee for president: Donald Trump.
“I don’t endorse, and so we don’t share that information,” he says. “Because I’m the chief election official, and I think that way, but no matter how it goes, people know that Brad’s not saying that he’s going to try to tilt the scales one way or the other. I think that’s really important, because we have a very competitive state.” He adds, “My duty is to make sure it’s fair for everyone.”
The challenge for all of us is getting everyone to believe that it is.
Brian O’Keefe is the Executive Editor of Esquire. An award-winning writer and editor, he was previously the Deputy Editor and acting Editor in Chief of Fortune.
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