Former President Trump demonstrated virtually no knowledge of the conduct of modern elections procedures in a long and rambling phone call with Georgia’s top elections administrator as he ticked off a host of debunked and fanciful conspiracy theories he blamed for his electoral defeat.
The man on the other end of that call in early January, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), details months of mistruths and disinformation perpetuated by the Trump campaign that led up to their conversation in a new book out Tuesday, “Integrity Counts.”
The book includes a roughly 40-page transcript of the call itself, which shows an increasingly agitated Trump grasping at allegations that Raffensperger and his top deputy systematically refute as then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows pleaded with the Georgia officials to investigate further and Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to deliver the state’s electoral votes.
President Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton to carry Georgia’s electoral votes, by a margin of 11,779 votes.
“Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break,” Trump told Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the general counsel to the secretary of state, according to the transcript.
“This repeated request for votes showed me that President Trump really had no idea how elections work. The secretary of state’s office doesn’t allocate any votes,” Raffensperger writes in an annotation of the call.
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