Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has served as Georgia’s Secretary of State since 2019. He testified before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and is the author of Integrity Counts.

The following interview was conducted by Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on Nov. 15, 2023. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Who you are and how you come into this story on Election Day. Just briefly, your position. What was your job? 

Well, I am still secretary of state in the state of Georgia. And I was elected in 2018. Took office January 2019. 

And what was Election Day like? Did you vote in person that day? Did it seem different than other Election Days?

No, I actually voted early, just because during Election Day, we’re pretty busy, so I wanted to get that out of the way. So I voted early. And then Election Day itself, from our standpoint, was relatively quiet. When you look at it, though, in hindsight, the turnout wasn’t very strong, and that’s one of the reasons that it just went very, very smoothly. Lines were short. Lines were, on average, less than three minutes in the afternoon of Election Day.

There’s going to be so much controversy that’s going to come out of that day, as you know. Did you have any sense of it on that day?

No, not at the time. We were working through Election Day, is just people out there voting. We knew that probably, based on trends, that the Democrat nominee would probably do better with the absentee ballot process, since the Republican nominee had disparaged that whole form of voting. Early voting was probably still—my guess is that it probably favored the Republican nominee. And then on Election Day, we thought that would be strongly supportive of the Republican candidates. 

You’re a Republican. And you supported President [Donald] Trump going into that election? What was sort of your personal politics?

Well, personally, I’m a conservative, and I voted for President Trump in 2016; I voted for him in 2020. 

And how did you see your role in that day? Did your politics matter to you as your job is overseeing the elections as secretary of state? 

My job as secretary of state is to make sure we have honest, fair and accurate elections, and so we were really just watching what the counties were doing. We provide oversight over those counties, making sure that if there’s any issues, that they are dealt with very quickly. And our job was really just to report the results when the counties finished their processing of all the election results.

… Tell me about your background, essentially. Do you think that affected the way that you approached your job as secretary of state?

Well, I’m a structural engineer, also a business owner, and so I looked at the office of secretary of state as, how do we really improve the process of elections? But also, in Georgia, the secretary of state has oversight over corporations, professional licensing, securities and charities, and obviously elections. So I’m a licensed structural engineer, so how do we improve the licensing process, was very important to me for not just engineers, but for nurses, our largest profession, and the other 130 different professions that we license in the state of Georgia. 

Then, from the standpoint of a business owner, how do we make sure we have a smooth-running corporations division? How do we expedite that? Can we have three-year renewals, which we instituted for corporations owners. And then, as it relates to elections, we needed to work on getting new voting machines in Georgia, and that’s what I ran on, because we had the old machines without a verifiable paper ballot. So we stood up in record time the largest and fastest implementation that’s ever happened in America. All 159 counties had new election equipment, with a verifiable paper ballot, ready for the election of 2020.

And on election night, as you’re administering it, looking for problems, seeing numbers come in, does that background with engineering, with numbers, do you think, influence the way you’re seeing things and running things?

Well, from our standpoint, we were looking at the process of what was happening. But I had some people on my team that really had worked on campaigns. And when they really saw the numbers coming in, relatively low, they were concerned that that was going to really hurt President Trump, because President Trump had really put all his eggs in the basket of Election Day voting, and we just didn’t have really strong turnout.

Our team felt that, from a political standpoint, if we would have had 1.3 million people show up on Election Day, then President Trump would have been in great shape, but just didn’t have those numbers of people showing up on Election Day.

So you could tell, even that night, as it’s not clear, I assume, who is going to win Georgia. 

We didn’t know who was going to win. Didn’t know who was going to win, but knew it was going to be a lot closer than people were surmising. People were making a lot of guesses. This state had been reliably Republican since 2002. So we had Gov. Sonny Perdue, Gov. Nathan Deal, and then Gov. [Brian] Kemp won in 2018. But I was in a runoff when I won in 2018, and Gov. Kemp won by 55,000 votes. So the margins were getting tighter. Then, obviously, it got within 12,000 votes here between the Republican and the Democrat nominees for president.

The president comes out that night and says, “Frankly, we did win the election.” Was that the first sign to you that there might be trouble? How did you react to that moment, to hearing about that?

I don’t really recall that. We were focused in on what was happening here in Georgia, because you really had 50 other states. So what happened in Pennsylvania, what happened in Michigan or any other state—so when I heard that comment, if I would have heard it and recalled it, I would have just thought that would be a generalized comment, that he was expecting to win nationwide. It just, when I look at what happened in Georgia, as we continued the tabulation of the ballots, eventually that President Trump did come up short. 

What was the first sign to you that there might be trouble ahead, that there might be questions, that this was something—that there was danger ahead in this election count?

Well, it wasn’t about danger, but was President Trump going to come up short, was really, after you finished the tabulation of all the in-person voting, you still had yet to go ahead and do the tabulation for all the absentee voting. So many of the absentee ballots that had come in had been pre-scanned, so you had to go ahead and verify them through signature match, looking at the envelopes. Then, after they’d been verified, then you’d separate the envelopes from those absentee ballots. Then you had to do that whole process. 

Well, that was a several-day process, but as that process went through, the race kept on getting closer and closer and closer, and then finally, at one point, then it flipped over, and the vote totals started favoring President [Joe] Biden. 

Had you heard over the summer President Trump’s claims about mail-in voting, his concerns? I think he’d been in Georgia two days before the election, expressing some of these. How did you react when you heard the rhetoric that he had towards the election and towards voting?

Well, it wasn’t a very constructive “Get out the vote” strategy for himself, because what it did, it really discouraged people from voting absentee, and yet he voted absentee, by mail, in Florida. But by doing that, what I believe happened is that he depressed turnout for Republicans, and I think many Republicans didn’t realize how competitive Georgia was since it had been so reliably Republican for years. But it just discouraged people to come out and vote. Instead of coming out and voting in person, there were still a large number of people, if you were over 50 years old and had some type of underlying health condition, you were still probably concerned about COVID, and so those folks probably just didn’t vote. 

We saw that actually in the numbers. If you look at how many Republicans came out and voted during the primary that we had in the partisan primaries in June, that number, … there was 25,000 to 30,000 less Republicans that came out and voted in the fall election. So that was one delta point we saw. 

And then the other one we saw later on is that 28,000 people skipped the presidential race. They didn’t vote for anyone, and yet they voted down-ballot for other races. And that’s why we saw the Republican congressmen also collectively, all of them together, got about 28,000 more votes than President Trump. And that’s why President Trump ended up coming up short.

So for you, it wasn’t a mystery why the president lost the election in Georgia. 

No, it was just really about the numbers. We saw what had happened. We had 28,000 people just skip the presidential race. We went and we checked all the allegations that were made. They said there was 10,000 dead people, and we found a total of two at the time; we found two more. So just four dead people that voted. There was no underage voting. Everyone was 18 by Election Day. But many people didn’t realize you could register to vote when you were 17 1/2, so we had day, month, year in our information that wasn’t out there available. We don’t share day, month, year birthdates out there in public space, because it’s people’s personal information. So we verified all that. So every allegation that was raised, we went ahead, and we checked it out. We did our due diligence.

You said that on election night, you were paying attention to counting your own state and not paying attention to the rhetoric that the president is. But as the election starts to become more clear in those days, they are starting to make claims about Georgia. The president is saying that he won in Georgia, and Rudy Giuliani is supporting him. What are you thinking as you’re hearing that?

Well, it really just started creating all sorts of dissension and really tearing apart our social fabric. We had the numbers, and so we just calmly went back, and we just continued to repeat the numbers. But we also made sure that we went back and we checked, double-checked, triple-checked, to make sure we didn’t miss anything. 

Were you in touch with the campaign when they’re making claims on television or in press conferences saying that they won, are you in touch with them, saying, “What are the specifics?” What’s the conversation that you’re having? As we’re watching things happen on television, what’s going on behind the scenes?

Well, behind the scenes, it didn’t take long before we started getting lawsuits, and then our lawyers would be talking to their lawyers, and our general counsel would be talking to people in the know and just saying, having conversations, “No, this is what’s really happening here.” But this whole election disinformation just bit off a life of its own. Once it started, it just couldn’t be stopped. 

You write in the book that the rumors were rolling in faster than you could respond. Tell me about that and about what that period was like.

Well, it just continued to cascading allegations. It starts with one thing, say, thousands of dead people, so you go ahead and you look into that. And then the next thing is all these underage voters; you look into that. Then they say there’s nonregistered voters, out-of-state voters, thousands of felons. And every one of them, you just keep on digging into it. And we’re going through our data, and we’re just verifying, “Here are what the facts are,” so we can be able to respond to the lawsuits that we’re getting. But we also had the facts, so we would then go out and do press conferences. So my chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, would go out and say, “Well, this is what we found. This is what was alleged. Here is what the actual data is.” 

So we were having press conferences all the time and giving people information, putting out notices. But some people just didn’t want to hear that. They just wanted to hear something different. But the facts were the facts, and our job was to report the actual results. 

How frustrating is that, to see Gabe Sterling out there on your behalf, responding to these allegations, but knowing that for a lot of people in your party, they’re believing them?

Well, I think many times, people wanted to believe it, or they didn’t have the courage to say, “Yes, they’re right. We know they’re right.” People that really knew how the election process worked, really knew the data, knew that these allegations weren’t supported by the facts, that our office was correct. But most people didn’t have the moral courage to stand up and buck the system. 

I gather it’s, even on election night, you write that your wife receives a text message about it’s going to get ugly and you should stand down. Does it start to become personal with you as a character in the crosshairs or whatever the right term is, early on? 

Yeah, I think they wanted to put on so much pressure that, as they say, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. And so really, they put so much pressure on us that I guess they wanted me to just kind of fold tent and go home and resign. And then they were I guess assuming that somehow, some other acting secretary of state could somehow have some additional power. But our job is just to follow the data. We’ve got to follow the law, follow the Constitution; we follow the numbers. The numbers took us to where we were, that President Trump came up short. But people just didn’t want to grasp and accept the simple fact that 28,000 people skipped the presidential race. They didn’t vote for anyone, yet they voted down-ballot for other races. And that, in a nutshell, is why President Trump came up short.

Gabe Sterling said that Nov. 9, which is the day that Senators [Kelly] Loeffler and [David] Perdue call on you to resign was sort of a turning-point moment, where things ramp up. Can you tell me? Did that come out of the blue, when you see that statement from them? What happened on that day?

Well, apparently they had a meeting with the state party, and they cooked up this idea, and so they both then just asked for my resignation, and so I responded that that wasn’t happening. 

Had you expected that?

No, not until it happened. There was no call, “What’s going on?” In fact, if their staff members reached out to our staff members, there was no inclination that it was going to happen. So it was just, they put out a press release. They decided to do that. And I said, “Well, I’m not resigning.” But then that did kind of—then was kind of like, I guess, where all the death threats and all the other threats that came out of it, and all the vitriol, and it just got ramped up to a whole different level. That was like the beginning of the war drums beating. 

And you knew both of them personally, maybe Perdue a little better than Loeffler? But you had known them and respected them?

Yeah. I had known both of them, been at different events over a period of time. Obviously not Kelly Loeffler as much as Sen. Perdue, because she hadn’t been in that role as long, but yeah, I knew who they were, and they knew who I was.

Do you think that call was that you weren’t doing what the president—what President Trump wanted? Is that why they issued that statement?

You’d have to ask them. 

Did you have any idea of what they wanted, or what it was, when people were calling for you to resign, what it was that they wanted you to do?

Well, they wanted a different outcome, but our job is just to report the results. We’re just following the numbers. It’s as simple as that. I wish you could say it was more complicated, but all we do is we listen to what the counties do, and then we just report the results. If there’s allegations of fraud or allegations of inaccuracies, then our job is to go ahead and investigate. Like I said, when they said there was 10,000 dead people, we went ahead and investigated. We found that there was just two at the time; we found two more. They said there were 66,000 underage voters. There were zero. People can register to vote when they’re 17 1/2. We made sure that every one of them was 18 by Election Day. So that didn’t happen. Then they said there’s 2,400 nonregistered voters. There were zero. They said that there was over 2,000 felons. Less than 74 were still under felony sentences. Every single allegation. 

And then when State Farm Arena came out, we had looked at that after that had hit the news medias from that state Senate meeting, where Rudy Giuliani started narrating, that, “Here, look what they’re doing here. Look what they’re doing there.” And he was just spinning things up. None of it was supported by the facts. We then called in our investigators. We called in other news media outlets. We called in the GBI [Georgia Bureau of Investigation]. Even called in the FBI. About a month later, President Trump called in Bobby Christine, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, to become the acting attorney of the Northern District. Bobby Christine specifically looked at it and dismissed it. 

But it’s been two and a half years, three years, I guess, since that event, and people still believe that something happened at State Farm Arena, because that’s how effective the disinformation and the outright lies were that were propagated during that time. 

One of the other specific claims is that claim about the Dominion voting machine, famously made by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell at the RNC press conference, and this idea that they’re flipping or deleting votes. When you hear that allegation come out in November, what’s your response to that?

Well, I knew it wasn’t true. But I guess you’d call it I called their bluff, because what we did is, when we did our audit, we did not just [do] a subsection of the 5 million ballots, but we did 100% audit of all 5 million ballots. And instead of using the machines, we did a hand re-tally. So all 5 million ballots were recounted, and we got virtually the same result. 

Now President Trump did pick up some votes, about 3,000, because we found some errors up in Rome, Georgia, Floyd County. There’s a few there that weren’t scanned, and a couple other counties. So they went to President Trump’s benefit, but at the end of the day, he still came up about 11,800 votes short.

So just tell me—I know you just did, but I can ask you again, to make sure it’s clear. What does the hand recount do to the theory about Dominion voting machines deleting, and why?

Well, the machines come up with a certain total, and then you go ahead and you pull up all the paper ballots, because we had paper ballots for all ballots—absentee, earlies, and Election Day votes. We had a verifiable paper ballot. Then you look at the human-readable text. Who did you vote for president? And so we had three stacks for President Trump, Vice President Biden and the Libertarian candidate. Yeah, so three stacks, and then just go ahead and hand-count them. 

Now, many of our counties—we have 159 counties—but a good third of our counties didn’t have a single difference between the hand re-tally, hand count, and then the hand recount. So the machines and the hand-counts were virtually the same in about a third of our counties. The other ones had like deltas of plus or minus one or two, small counties. And there was about three counties that were—one county picked up over 2,000-, almost 3,000-vote difference that went to President Trump. So we squeezed out any inaccuracies, but we also showed that the machines had not flipped the votes. How could you argue when you get the same results with the machine count and the hand recount? So we proved that. We disproved what they were saying. And it also showed that President Trump came up short.

Was it frustrating? … When you hear a conspiracy theory that is so out there, and you’re trying to fight back against it, is it frustrating? Does it feel like you have the soapbox that you need to respond to these lawyers who are at the Republican National Committee?

Well, what can you do? They had bigger microphones than us, so we just responded with facts. But, as my friend says, a person of integrity expects to be believed, and when he’s not, he lets time prove him right. And time has proven us right. Some of those people have already pled guilty to some of their misdeeds following the 2020 election. 

Well, what is it like when President Trump tweets about you, when he calls you a RINO at one point, when he names you in a tweet? What happens? What is that like?

Well, certainly you get plenty of people calling and saying all sorts of threats, things like that. But I can’t control what people want to do and what people want to say. All I know is, I’m a conservative. I have been all my life, and I continue to be a conservative. And I believe in the American ideal of free markets, free people and opportunity for everyone, which is really the ideal laid out by [former President Ronald] Reagan. I guess you’d call myself a traditional Reagan conservative. 

And what is it that you see in your personal life? Because you write about it, and you’ve testified about it, the threats, people outside your house. Can you just tell me about what that period is like personally for you and for your wife?

Well, at some level—now I can look back it; it’s been several years—it’s just frustrating. It’s frustrating because people wanted to believe so badly that they just didn’t want to look at the facts. They wanted an outcome so badly that they didn’t want to look at the facts. But the fact is that 28,000 people, voters, voters had a freewill choice on who they wanted to vote for, for every single race, and when they looked at the presidential race, 28,000 of those voters in Georgia chose to leave the top of that ticket blank, and yet they voted down-ballot. That was their freewill choice. And who am I to argue with that? And that’s why President Trump came up short. 

So that’s what happened. And at the end of the day, our job is to report the results. And I’m sorry that they’re disappointed. And, you know, as a Republican, I would have liked a different result. I voted, as I said, for President Trump in 2016 and 2020. But my job is to do my job. My job is to follow the law and follow the Constitution. It’s as simple as that. It’s not more complicated. It’s just to make sure we do our job; make sure we hold the counties accountable; make sure we have fair, honest elections for everyone. 

… As you know, there are other people in this story [who had] to make the same decision as you do. We’ve spoken to some of them. And there are others who make a different decision and who take actions that undermine the election and the results of the election. Why do you think you were able to do what you did? Why were you and [your wife] Tricia able to go through that crucible and not resign or not give in? Why did you make a different decision than some others did?

My parents that raised me—my dad was a patriot, World War II veteran. I think my upbringing, my parents, my faith, Tricia… and my kids. Knowing that at the end of the day, I’d have to be able to look my kids in the eye and to make sure that I did right. And at the end of the day, it really gets down to being able to look at yourself in the mirror for the rest of your life, and I can do that, knowing that I did the right thing. 

I know people are disappointed. People wanted a different outcome. But our job is to do our job, and it’s as simple as that. And if people come up short, I would highly agree with most people, I don’t think it works for you to not accept the loss. I think it’s best just to gracefully win or gracefully lose. You can always come back and fight another day, and that is your right. But that’s the standard that I have for myself, and I hope I keep it in public service. And I think that when we start not maintaining that standard, I don’t think that’s good for the political conversations that we have. 

There’s a moment, I think it’s on Thanksgiving, when the president calls you an “enemy of the people.” You write about what that means in the book and how that phrase had been used in other countries. When you heard that applied to you, what did you think, and what do you think the president was evoking with using that phrase?

I know that everyone gets offended these days, but it’s an offensive statement when you’re doing your job. We take an oath to a Constitution, an oath of office, and the highest ideal is always follow your oath. When we follow our oath, we are really honoring the legacy of our nation, the legacy of everyone that has ever signed up in our armed forces, that fought for our freedom, and I think we’re honoring the legacy of the founders who signed the Declaration of Independence. That’s really what our job is to do, is to honor the legacy of all the people that have gone before, to make sure that we stand firmly for our Constitution. We are a nation of laws, and our job is to follow the rule of law, no matter what.

… The famous Gabriel Sterling press conference, where he warns in some ways about what would happen, how passionately did he feel going into that moment, that led him to issue that warning in the way that he did?

Well, we had seen that there had been threats against election workers, specifically out in one of our metro counties, and it was really dangerous what was being threatened, and it hearkened back to the darker days of our history. And so that’s why Gabriel Sterling felt compelled to call that out. And he said if people want to lead, they need to lead so with true leadership, which is leading with honor, and to call yourself, to really be noble in your speech and noble in your actions. 

And so it also turned out to be prophetic. And I thought it would be an election worker that ended up dying, but it all culminated on Jan. 6 with someone else dead. Whenever anyone dies, it’s a tragedy. And it’s just sad that all that misinformation, disinformation, all the lies that people had been spinning up post-election led to that day on Jan. 6. And I think that’s when people breathed deep gasps at what they saw and stepped back from the breach. And it’s something, a place that we don’t need to go to again. 

He has the press conference, and it’s two days later that Rudy Giuliani is in town. You mentioned this presentation that he gives to the state Senate, where he’s going to talk about—or he’s going to make a presentation that includes the State Farm Arena thing. Just help me understand that moment, because your office is not at that hearing. What is going on with that hearing and with what Rudy Giuliani is claiming?

Well, no one challenged anything he said, and so he just kind of freewheeled it and just kind of then started narrating and stating things that just absolutely did not happen. But it got out there in TV land and got on cable networks, and it went across the country, and before we could get out there and say, “That’s not what happened,” obviously it was on national media, and then it was spun up by other people. It just ramped up all the anger and vitriol to just a much higher level.

Do you hold Giuliani responsible? You write in the book, “Giuliani intentionally misled our senators.” Do you hold him responsible for what he was saying that day?

I believe that time will hold him responsible for what he said. 

Did he have any basis for saying what he was saying, for making the claims that they were making in that presentation?

No, because time has proven that what he said was not supported by the facts, because President Trump later on picked Bobby Christine to look into it. So if he did not believe our investigators, the GBI investigators and FBI, well, President Trump handpicked Bobby Christine to look into it. The U.S. Attorney of the Southern District came up to Atlanta as acting U.S. attorney of the Northern District. Bobby Christine specifically looked at the State Farm Arena, and he said, “There’s nothing there.” And so he dismissed it. 

But that’s been, what, almost three years now, and people are still leaning into it, because they’d rather believe a lie than believe the truth. The cold, hard, brutal fact is that 28,000 people in Georgia did not vote for anyone for president, and that’s why President Trump came up short. And the sooner you face the brutal truth, the sooner then you can move on and figure out, how do I move forward and have a winning message to win the next time? 

… As the attention turns on Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, you say in the book, a couple of hours after that, people are identifying them, and then Rudy Giuliani is mentioning them by name at another presentation. They didn’t work directly for you, but they’re part of the process that you oversee. What’s your reaction as you see election workers, and those two in particular, become a target of these conspiracy theories? 

Well, I know that their life was turned into a living hell, and they were finally exonerated by every law enforcement agency that looked at it, and the State Election Board also exonerated them and said that nothing happened at State Farm, and they didn’t do anything. And I know that they’ve had some court cases, suing people for defamation, and they have been successful in those cases.

But at the end of the day, they had people showing up at their door, terrorizing them, and they were living for fear that their life would be taken. So it’s an understatement to say it’s extremely unfortunate. It’s—I don’t know how to describe. They’re doing their job, and their life was just turned into a living hell, and that shouldn’t happen to anyone, anytime, anyplace in America. 

… Let me ask you, as we get into December, did you hear anything about the alternate elector scheme that we have now heard about? Did you know about that at the time it was going on?

We heard about it. It was one of those things. And we heard about it. Didn’t know maybe all who all the players were, but there were some reports that had come out, and we had enough on our plate on other issues. 

When you look back, the January 6 Committee has said that a number of people told the president, for example on the Dominion claim, that it wasn’t true, and they list all of the people from the attorney general to—I think to you. What is it like to see those claims being repeated as we’re in this period that you know are not true and to hear later that the president was told, the former president was told that they weren’t true?

Well, you always wondered, did he believe it, or he was told that he just was going to keep on leaning into it, just because he was so committed, that he just couldn’t believe that he lost to Vice President Biden? But there’s more information that comes out after the fact. But when you’re in it, all you know is what you see and what you experience every day, because we don’t know what’s going on up in the White House; we don’t know what’s going on all these other areas of information, feeding information to the president. 

But the famous phone call, tell me about hearing that the president of the United States wants to talk to you. Why do you think he wants to talk to you?

Well, I think he wanted to find out where we were in the election process and why is he coming up short. I assumed that it wasn’t going to be a pleasant experience, and I didn’t see how any good would come out of it. 

And how do you hear that he wants to talk to you? Does somebody tell you? Does the phone suddenly ring?

I explained that. I went on the Neil Cavuto show, and I shared some of those data points, and I don’t think he liked hearing that, so he called—I guess he told Mark Meadows that he wanted to talk to me, so Mark Meadows reached out to my deputy secretary of state, and she called me, and I told her I didn’t think that was a good idea. And we were kind of told that, no, we definitely need to have this conversation, so I said, well, if we’re going to do that, I want to make sure my general counsel is on this call, because we have these lawsuits from the Trump campaign and all these other groups, and we need to make sure that we have legal representation on the call.

… So tell me about just getting the phone call and what you were thinking at that moment.

Well, it was almost—who would believe that a secretary of state would get a call from the president, and then the president expressing his lack of pleasure at the election results, and what could you do, you know? “Surely there’s a mistake here someplace, and start looking.” And so it really just continues to say what we’ve been saying since day one. We’ve checked this out, this out, this out. So I respectfully told him—he mentioned 5,000, even though he’d been assuming 10,000 dead people. I said no, that there weren’t 5,000 dead people; we found a total of two. And all those allegations. No, there weren’t underage voters. What about this? No. … My general counsel, Ryan Germany, would respond to some of the allegations. “Now, Mr. President, that’s not true. This is what it actually is.” It was just one of those kind of moments. It was what it was, and it wasn’t a lot of fun. But we knew that, when the president wanted to have a call, I wanted to respect the positional authority of the president of the United States of America. 

Just tell me where you were, to set the scene for us. … Where are you when you take the call?

In the kitchen of our house. 

And you have it on speakerphone, is that right, with your wife there?

Yeah. 

I’m just trying to set the scene.

Yeah, I was there, had it on a little stand, and I had a piece of paper, and I’m going to make some notes and anything I wanted to make. … Then I just listened to him talk. And as he talked about certain things, I was making some notes. OK, 5,000, OK, great, I’ll respond to that. But when I got an opportunity to speak, then I just said, “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is your data is wrong.” 

You write that you had some expectations about the call, that you had been a subcontractor, and you sort of thought of Trump as the developer. What did you mean by that? What was the dynamics that you were expecting?

Well, in the construction business, it all rolls downhill. So you’ve got the developer, general contractor, subcontractor and the general suppliers. We knew where we were in the food chain, and even if we didn’t make a mistake, at the end of the day, you had to make sure you kept your general contractor happy, because he had to keep his developer happy, because at the end of the day, they’ve got a deadline; they’ve got a schedule; they want to accomplish objectives. 

So we’re used to getting pushed, prodded and having high-volume conversations. And, to the president’s credit, it was not a high-volume conversation; it was just an insistent conversation. And I could expect someone to be persistent and insistent on kind of a different outcome. But my job was just to respond with the facts. And if I had a different set of facts, I would have responded with whatever they were. Our job was to give him the true data, which I did, and he didn’t care for it.

… So what happens in the first 20 minutes?

The president is talking about different theories that he has and throws out a lot of different ideas, and then he talks about other states, about, well, he won Florida by all these number of votes, and he won Alabama, and all these other states tell him that, “No, Mr. President, there’s no way that you didn’t win Georgia,” and all these other people. And there was just a lot of different things that he spun up. 

When you do speak, you’re pretty direct in what you say on some of these things. Like the State Farm video, you say, “It’s unfortunate that they sliced and diced that video and took it out of context.” Is it hard to be speaking to the president of the United States, who very clearly believes this, and for you to sort of debunk those claims in such a direct way?

I think it’s best to deal with people with the facts, and I think I was respectful, but I was also a direct communicator in that. I think one of the challenges that a lot of people had around President Trump is that they never spoke to him directly, truthfully. Perhaps they did. But if you don’t speak truth to someone, then they can go and have maybe misconception of what the actual facts are. I think if they would have dealt with it really forthrightly with them and explained exactly what the details are, maybe things wouldn’t have gotten spun up so badly that they did. 

When you offer things, like you offer a link, or you offer a specific—on the State Farm video, you say, “Here’s a link to it,” it seems like the president is not particularly interested in it. Do they ever express interest in the facts that you’re describing or the evidence that you’re offering? Does he follow up afterwards?

No, their team didn’t. I know, a few days after that, they did drop their lawsuit. But at the end of the day, I just wanted to say, “We have the facts on our side, and I’m sorry that you don’t like the outcome. I get that. I wouldn’t like to lose a race either. But here is what the facts are.” And we can all have great theories on why President Trump came up short, but those are for the political prognosticators. But my job is just to report the facts, report the data.

And did you have any sense that that was going to convince him on that phone call?

My job was to do my job and to report the data. How he accepted it, that was really up to him. But I wanted to make sure that if people look back in history, or the people that were on the call—well, now they can hear it—but they can say, “Well, was Brad respectful to the president?” And I wanted to make sure that I respect his positional authority.

I think one of the things that we have right now in America is people don’t respect people’s positional authority, be it from city council, getting people coming in, you should still be respectful to your city council members. And likewise, elected officials, be respectful at all times to the public. I think it’s just about mutual respect. Though we have disagreements, but let’s do it respectfully in our disagreements. 

The famous line about 11,780 votes, what is your reaction to that? Do you know what it is that he’s asking? Is that something you can do?

No. I knew we couldn’t, because we had been looking at, we’d been pressing our team, “Did we miss anything?” Because sometimes, if you think that you’re right, but you won’t have really the diligence to check into something, you could end up realizing, “Oh, I missed this.” So we were turning over every rock, every area. Did we miss anything? And that’s why, when we did that 100% hand re-tally during that audit process, what did we find? That Fulton County made some mistakes; Floyd County made mistakes; and another county made some mistakes. And it all added up that President Trump picked up about 3,000 more votes. Well, that’s a good thing that we found those. Wasn’t a good thing that they’d made the mistake, but by going through that process, we did kind of squeeze out any kind of errors. 

It’s just like checking the birthdates of everyone, day, month, year. We could then say conclusively, there were zero underage voters that voted in the state of Georgia. Everyone was 18. Things like that. So that’s why we did our due diligence, so we could come back with confidence and say, “No. Whoever that was, we checked it out, and here is the data.” 

You’re saying that you couldn’t find mistakes that were going to get him to win the election. I won’t ask you what you think the president was asking for, but if he was asking, which is what some people have said, if he was asking for you to basically give him the election or to just change the vote count, is that something the secretary of state of Georgia can do, add an 11,780 votes to one side?

No. You have to have the numbers. Somehow you’d have to find a box with 12,000 votes in it that all went for one person or the other. But that’s why I said we were just following the process. That’s what this is, really. This is really a process. It’s a very methodical process. Really, as we said in my letter to Congress, there’s never a perfect election; there’s always a few things. And that’s why, as your state gets more competitive, you kind of look at, how do we squeeze out any of these inaccuracies? How do we make sure? So we have photo ID for all forms of voting. We make sure that we now have photo ID for absentee voting, and send a signature match so that we give voters’ confidence and also securing that process. 

We have verifiable paper ballots. Now we can do 100% recounts if that’s what it takes to prove this is how close the races are. In fact, we just had municipal elections a week or so ago, and we had a couple places where there’s a runoff. Two voters got 28 votes, I believe it was, in one county, for a city council seat, so there will be a runoff in that. So that’s how close some elections can be when you have not a big turnout, but also, you just have everyone feeling 50-50: I like this guy; I like that person. And so it happens. So you want to just make sure you can squeeze out any kind of errors, any type of fraud in the elections, so you know you have honest, fair, accurate elections.

But deciding that the winner is who you wanted to be is not something you’re allowed to do.

Oh, that would be a violation of your oath of office. Our job is to report the facts. It’s, like I said, rule of law. We follow the law. We follow the Constitution. And I know I sound like a record that’s just repeating itself, but that’s our job. That’s what our job is to do. It’s just like a ref, refereeing a football game. He’s not to show favoritism towards either one of those teams. You just call balls and strikes, call the game as you see it. 

There’s talk, as you know, in that call that this is possibly a criminal offense; it’s a big risk for you; this is dangerous stuff for you to say. You write in the book, “I felt then, and still believe today, that it was a threat.” What was the language that the president was using, and how did you perceive it as a threat?

Well, he said that “If you’ve done illegality, that there’s a threat.” So I considered it an idle threat; we did not. But I also understand that the power of the federal government, and there’s an awful lot of power that people can bring to bear on individuals, and so no one likes someone reminding you that they have a really big stick. 

As a subtext of this conversation, “enemy of the people,” people outside your house—was that going through your mind, this other kind of threat that had been building up in those weeks leading up to that call?

No, I think at that particular time, it was really just the power that the federal government could come to bear, make your life miserable, tie you up in all sorts of legal costs that you’re trying to defend yourself when all you did was do your job. 

Did you see that call in terms of a challenge to you or a moment where you had to uphold your oath of office, that that was what was at stake between what the president was asking of you and in the course of action you were going to decide to take?

That’s an interesting question. I think really the former president was pushing to see if he could somehow, it would move me somewhere, someplace, because I think that’s been an effective strategy for him over his business career and political career, that people tended to buckle instead of stand firm on their principles. 

He was looking for weakness. 

Yeah, lack of moral courage. And I think he’s found that an awful lot during his business career and also political career, that people just wouldn’t say, “Respectfully, I’m sorry, sir. This is what we need to do, and this is why we need to do that.” 

When he characterizes the phone call in a tweet, and he says you were unwilling, unable to answer questions, when you see that tweet, what was your response?

Well, I believe that I did respond that we answered all of his questions. He just didn’t like the answers, because the answers were, at the end of the day, what the answers were. And we just had the results, and here is where they are. Like I said, we found two more dead people, and we don’t know if that added to his total or took it away. But those were virtually the numbers. There weren’t thousands and thousands of different numbers there. We had been doing that for the last 60 days of checking everything out.

… As the January 6 Committee starts gearing up and investigating this, how do you hear that they want to talk to you? … Do they just subpoena you? How do they reach out to you?

Well, I know that we were subpoenaed. We had been subpoenaed, and then we had a conversation with them. 

And what was it like dealing with them, dealing with that investigation?

Well, I thought they were professional. They asked questions. One of my first takeaways was, “Oh, they have more information than I thought they had,” because as they were asking questions, I thought, “Oh, someone else has been here, and they’ve gotten some background information.” So they were doing a deep dive. They had resources to bring to bear that I wasn’t aware of. 

And when they said that they want you to go to testify at the hearing, what was your reaction to that? Were you going just because you were subpoenaed? Were you looking forward to having a chance to air?

No, I was subpoenaed again for that, and since I was subpoenaed, I would show up to respect the process.

And was there any feeling and emotion on your part of either fear of bringing this stuff back up or of relief to be able to do it in a venue like that?

I think it was almost like we’re having a conversation here, just explaining exactly “Here’s what happened,” and explaining those data points. 

… Was there any level of relief to be able to tell that story publicly, to be sworn in and to have people know that you’re saying, telling your story under oath?

I didn’t think it really would change anyone’s opinion. I think really, people had set—people that really had dug into the facts were going to accept what was said and already had probably accepted it. The other people that couldn’t accept it, then they weren’t going to, no matter what I said. And really, the positions were pretty much hardened and then cast in place. And that’s nothing I can change. But I was called to testify, so I provided truthful testimony.

… One of the questions that people ask—I won’t ask you whether your personal experience has shaped it—is how close did we come, and how fragile is our democracy? And you were obviously a key person in holding that and making sure the election went through. But do Americans have reason to be worried that things could have gone differently?

That’s an interesting question, how close were we to the breach, and I don’t really have an answer for that. I do think that, by and large, I think we really need to work on our educational system, teaching people about civics. Also, I think people need to have more pride in our country and pride in our heritage and pride in our Constitution and the founding of this country.

I think sometimes there are some people that are trying to create doubt or lack of pride in what we have and where we are as a nation. I’m not saying that we were perfect, but our Constitution allowed us to form a more perfect union through constitutional amendments, and we are still the beacon for the entire world. So I think we need to understand that it’s our job to really make sure that we’re good citizens and that we have—make sure that we have good candidates of good character up and down the line, because if you go back in Scripture and you read what Paul wrote to Titus, it’s really about when you’re going there and establishing churches. But he says, “Titus, find good overseers in these areas, people beyond reproach.” 

So when you’re looking for someone for city council, state house, state senate, Congress, senator, president, look for someone of noble character. Look for someone that has wisdom, someone that you know you can respect up and down the line, from the school board to the presidency and everything in between.

Don’t lower your standards. Let’s elevate our standards. Let’s look for people that you look at them and say, “Wow, I wish I could be like that person. I wish I could be like that person when I grow up,” as we did as kids. We do it with football players, right? We all want to be that star quarterback; we all want to be that star running back. But does that really elevate to this idea, this higher plane? Because we’ve had some great leaders. 

And I am, I guess, a child of Reagan. I saw what he did. But character was king when he was president. But it’s that level of behavior. Look at what we had with [former President Dwight] Eisenhower—led our nation in war, then in peace. Then we look at [former President Abraham] Lincoln, these great, pivotal leaders. These hinge points that we had—very, very important. And I think that’s what we need to look for. Don’t settle for something. 

And I think that’s right, right now, both political parties are churning, looking for the next person to lead them for the next generation. And I would hope that we find that person from our party sooner than later. I know the other side is probably looking, too, because they’re not having a lot of success with the guy that they got right now and his number two. Just keeping it real. And that’s as far as I’ll go into the politics of it. But I think that really encapsulates the American feeling where we are right now.