‘I think time has shown that we are right,’ Raffensperger said of his decision to push back on Trump’s stolen election claims.
Georgia’s elections are the most secure and trustworthy in the country, according to an election integrity scorecard released on Tuesday by the Heritage Foundation.
The No. 1 ranking comes barely a year after former president Donald Trump alleged that the 2020 election in Georgia was rigged against him, and eight months after President Joe Biden called the state’s new election security law “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” and “an un-American law to deny people the right to vote.”
In an interview with National Review, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he was “very pleased and grateful” about the top ranking, which was based on a review of the election laws in all 50 states.
“I think it shows that we have struck the proper balance between accessibility and security,” Raffensperger said. “It’s nice for Georgia to get recognition after coming through a tough cycle where we knew we had an honest and fair election, we knew that we had followed the law, and we knew that we and robust security to make sure that we could identify the voters.”
The Heritage Foundation analysis scored each state on 12 categories, with a maximum of 100 points. The biggest points were awarded for requiring voter identification, maintaining accurate voter registration lists, and managing absentee ballots. Points also were awarded for things like restricting ballot harvesting, providing access to election observers, and citizenship verification.
Georgia topped the list with 83 points, including a top score (20 points out of 20) for its voter ID implementation. Georgia was followed in the ranking by Alabama (82 points), Tennessee (79), and Arkansas and Florida (78 points).
In general, southern states and red states tended have higher scores, while blue states and states in the west and northeast generally received lower scores. The bottom five states were Vermont (39 points), Oregon (38), California (30), Nevada (28) and Hawaii (26).
In a press release accompanying the scorecard, the Heritage Foundation said that Americans deserve to have complete confidence in the nation’s elections, including that their vote won’t be lost, stolen, altered, or negated by fraud.
“At a time when cynicism runs deep on both ends of the political spectrum, the need to protect the people’s elections, and to safeguard the value of every citizen’s vote, couldn’t be clearer,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a prepared statement.
Raffensperger noted Georgia’s high scores in regard to verifying the citizenship of voters, and providing access for election observers. Georgia also received top scores for its vote-counting practices, for not allowing same-day voter registration, for not allowing private funding of election officials, and for requiring that people who assist voters identify themselves.
Raffensperger also stressed the importance of requiring voter ID, which many on the left argue disproportionally disenfranchises minorities. He countered that voter ID laws are “supported by majorities in both political parties and every single demographic group in America.”
“So why does the left always fight that?” he said. “They’re not even aligned with their people in their own party, so it makes no sense. When you push that you don’t support photo ID, what people are really hearing is that you don’t really support voter integrity.”
Raffensperger also continued to push back on allegations from Trump and his allies that the 2020 presidential election was mired by fraud. After the election, Trump called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people.” U.S. Representative Jody Hice, a Trump-backed Republican challenging Raffensperger for secretary of state, has said Trump would have won Georgia in 2020 if the election was “fair.” Hice’s campaign did not respond to an email sent by National Review about the Heritage Foundation scorecard on Tuesday afternoon.
“I think time has shown that we are right,” Raffensperger said when asked about Trump’s allegations. “We followed the law. We followed the Constitution. I wrote a letter to Congress on Jan. 6. They’ve had it now for eleven months. Did you know not a single person, out of 435 congresspeople, not one of them has ever written and said, ‘Brad, we disagree with this point here, or we disagree with that point there.’ They know that we have the law on our side, we have the facts on our side.”
Raffensperger said more than 28,000 Georgia voters skipped the presidential ballot in the November 2020 election, but then voted in other down-ballot races.
“That tells you what really happened in Georgia,” he said.
Last spring, the Georgia legislature passed S.B. 202 to further secure the state’s elections. Among its provisions, the law: requires voters to produce a driver’s license number, a state ID number, or the last four digits of a Social Security Number to request and return an absentee ballot; narrows the window for requesting a ballot; establishes the use of ballot drop boxes, but limits their location to early voting sites; and prohibits people from passing out food or drinks to people standing in line to vote, an effort to keep partisans from trying to sway voters just before they cast their ballot. Poll workers are still allowed to provide food and drinks to voters. That provision was prompted by Democratic politicians handing out pizza and snacks to voters.
In June, the U.S. Justice Department sued Georgia over the law, claiming that several provisions “were adopted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race.” State leaders pushed back, calling the legal action “a politicized intrusion into the State of Georgia’s constitutional authority to regulate the ‘time, place, and manner’ of its election.”