COWETA COUNTY, Ga. — Responding publicly for the first time after former President Donald Trump rehashed his fraud claims about Georgia and the 2020 election in a CNN town hall last week, Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger told 11Alive's Brittany Kleinpeter Wednesday that, "Every point that he raised, we've disproven it."
In an interview, as he toured Coweta County's election office, the secretary expressed his optimism about Georgia's readiness for the 2024 presidential election.
Trump, the leading Republican contender for 2024 as he seeks a return to office, continues to maintain that Georgia's election was "rigged."
State officials exhaustively vetted President Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia. Three counting of the votes and the dismissal of numerous allegations confirmed Biden's win.
During a town hall, the former president was asked about the now-infamous phone call he made to Raffensperger in early 2021. In the call, Trump reportedly urged the state's top election official to "find" the votes needed to reverse his narrow loss.
"Yeah, I called questioning the election," Trump said. "I thought it was a rigged election. I thought it had a lot of problems."
On Wednesday, Sec. Raffensperger refuted that.
"Every a that he raised, we've disproven it," said Raffensperger. "He said in his phone call there was 5,000 dead people, they actually litigated and sued us, and said there's 10,315 and we found a total of 4. He actually paid for a report... they said there was probably like 25-50 dead people - so 4. Well our number's right, but no one's ever talking about thousands of people."
Raffensperger recounted another claim about thousands of underage voters the state investigated.
"They said there's 66,000 underage voters, there were zero," he said. "Every single allegation that was ever raised proved to be false, and what it really did was unfortunately start tearing apart our social fabric."
State officials found further claims about double voters and voters who had moved that were meritless. Lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies uniformly failed in courts at the earliest hurdles.
Claims about "suitcases full of ballots," nefarious late-night counting at State Farm Arena, ballot shredding in Cobb County and ballot stuffing around metro Atlanta drop boxes were reviewed by the state.
Looking ahead to another potentially chaotic election cycle in Georgia, Raffensperger said he felt the state was in "good shape."
"We're expecting very big turnout numbers next year," he said. "When we see facilities like this (in Coweta County), we're really excited, we're gonna handle whatever is thrown our way."