by Robin Kemp
UPDATE 10:51 a.m. 12/20: Call moved to Tuesday, 10:30 a.m Dec. 21 due to COVID-19 per staff
COVID-19 has bumped a scheduled town hall call-in for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
According to a spokesman for Raffensperger’s office, “The vendor for our telephone town hall is scrambling because a key staffer got COVID and didn’t get our call set up beforehand….we are doing it the same time tomorrow because it’s taking the vendor too long to sort out and Secretary Raffensperger has more on his calendar today.”
The phone-in town hall meeting has been rescheduled for 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, December 21 for residents of the 13th Congressional District, which is Rep. David Scott’s district.
Raffensperger has been holding these telephone town halls to push back against false claims that the 2020 elections were not secure. Here’s some of what he told District 8 voters on a similar call earlier in the month.
In the past few days, Raffensperger, a Republican, has teed up “the media” and Democrats for allegedly spreading false claims about election security, equating Stacey Abrams with Donald Trump. Raffensperger stood up to Trump’s request to “find” enough votes for him to win Georgia in November 2020. However, Raffensperger told Trump that there were no such votes to be found. The Secretary of State ordered the Presidential election results to be recounted three times. Each time, Trump lost.
Trump-allied Georgia Republicans in the Gold Dome later removed Raffensperger as chair of the State Elections Board.
Abrams said she never challenged the election outcome, but the larger “system”:
“In 2018, I had spent more than a year traveling the state, but I’d also spent 10 years, 11 years in the state legislature,” Abrams told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “And I’d been working on voting rights since I was 17. And I’d watched. In fact, I’d battled with the then-secretary of state over his egregious and aggressive voter-suppression activities. And on the night on the 16th of November, when I acknowledged I would not become governor, that he had won the election, I did not challenge the outcome of the election unlike some recent folks did. What I said was that the system was not fair. And leaders challenge systems. Leaders say we can do better. And that’s what I declared.”
Abrams went on to found an election rights group, Fair Fight, and is running for governor again in 2022 against Gov. Brian Kemp and Trump backer David Perdue.
You can call into the meeting at (404) 474-8370.
