In Integrity Counts, lifelong Republican and
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks out against the former
president’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and hopes to
restore confidence and trust in our country’s elections.
“Brad
Raffensperger put public service above party service, and for that he is a true
democracy action hero, and he is also my hero. His book serves as a reminder
that American democracy is bigger than any individual candidate or election.”
—THE HON. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, former governor of
California
Integrity stands as the cornerstone of American
democracy.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State,
defended American democracy by refusing to bend to demands that he change the
legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election in his state.
Raffensperger’s defense of democracy made him a target
of President Donald Trump for months following the election, culminating in an
hour-long phone call in which the president told him, “I just want to find
11,780 votes,” the exact number he needed to win Georgia’s sixteen Electoral
College votes. Once again, Raffensperger refused. Georgia voters had spoken.
A lifelong conservative Republican who had financially
supported President Trump’s reelection campaign and voted for Trump,
Raffensperger called for a hand recount of every vote to confirm the results
and affirm the integrity of Georgia’s election. Still President Trump persisted
in his personal attacks.
One of the most troubling questions in the wake of the
2020 election, Raffensperger says, is whether America will see every candidate
who loses a major election refuse to accept the results and, instead, set out
to raise money and build support on unfounded claims of fraud and corruption.
To avoid that prospect, Americans must come to terms with the scope of the
problem, but doing so won’t be comfortable for either party.
Either party because the 2020 crisis was not
unprecedented in Georgia. By November 2020, Raffensperger had been challenging
the claims of a “stolen election” for nearly two years. In the fall of 2018,
after Democrat Stacey Abrams lost the race for governor of Georgia, she told a
crowd of supporters, “So, to be clear, this is not a speech of concession.
Concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper. As a woman
of conscience and faith, I cannot concede.”
The similarities don’t end there, and when considered
with some care, they paint a troubling picture of an all-too-bipartisan
willingness to undermine the integrity of our democracy, and the public’s
confidence in it, for the sake of personal and partisan gain.
Integrity Counts tells Raffensperger’s inspiring story
of commitment to the integrity of American democracy.
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