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>> coming up, georgia republican secretary of state brad raffensperger taking part in a discussion on election security turkey also discusses his phone call with former president trump in which he was asked to change georgia's presidential election results. posted by georgetown university in washington, d.c., this runs just over an hour. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] ..

>> growing up in rural georgia i've seen firsthand how increasing mistrust in elections has negatively impacted the current political climate. secretary raffensperger is dedicated in the democratic process and an example for aspiring people like myself. secretary of state brad raffensperger, georgia's 29th secretary of state, overwhelmingly reelected in 2022, to the city council in johns creek, georgia. and three years later to the georgia house of representatives, served for two terms and in 2018 georgia vote elected him. as secretary of state, raffensperger had the largest implementation of voting machines in this country on

time and on budget. under his leadership georgia modernized with the first audible paper system and giving power directly to the voter. first secretary of state to pass legislation requiring photo i.d. for all forms of voting and first to hold counties accountable to voters by expanding polling places. following his remarks, the secretary will take your questions moderated by the executive director of gio politics. you can join by tagging at gu politics and official hashtag at raffensperger. join me in welcoming georgia's secretary of state brad raffensperger. >> thank you for your warm introduction and participation of what we do at geo politics. thank all of you coming tonight

for spending part of your evening with us for what i expect will be an interesting conversation. mr. secretary, thank you for coming up and visiting us here on campus. >> looking forward to it. >> we met back in, i want to say october or november at a panel discussion up in new york city that i was moderating on the health of democracy and you were one of the panelists, but because it was a full panel, we didn't get to dive too deep. maybe you're okay with that, but tonight we're going to dive a little bit deeper. part of our programming this election year, as we have been thinking about how we want to program leading up to this year's election, we're going to do a lot of stuff about the campaign, but i saw a poll about a month ago that gallup

did that asked how satisfied you were with how democracy is working in this country. and a record low 28% of americans said that they were satisfied with how democracy was working. that's 17% of republicans, 38% of democrats and only 27% of independents. so we're going to do a lot of programming this year about that, about trust in democracy and i really wanted to kick that series off with this conversation, with you because the cornerstone of every democracy is the right to vote and following the last presidential election, we saw a real stress test on america's trust in elections and you,

this structural engineer who came to politics a little bit later from a nontraditional path found yourself at the center of that randall sort of maelstrom. i want to start there. >> okay. >> not spend too much time there, and then look forward. but everyone here is familiar with the infamous phone call. then president calling you up to find 11,780 votes. on a human level, what was it like getting that phone call and how did it-- how did you grapple with that? well, it's not something i looked forward to. [laughter] >> for many reasons because since the election of november we've been pushing back on all

the misinformation, disinformation, somewhere, the hopeful part of me was hoping if i had this call with the president and i give him the information, the data and would say, oh, that's why i came up short. so, that's what we did is we had a respectful conversation and that's circling back. i do want to emphasize, i do want to let you know, i wanted to make sure that i was respectful to his positional authority. a lot of time people in america people start shouting out at people at a city council meeting or state senate meeting or wherever that is, they don't respect people's positional authorities. you respect your teachers, respect your elders, respect-- you may not respect who they are as a person, but the position they hold deserves that respect. i wanted to make sure that i would be respectful because

that would be honoring my parents, how they brought us up, how they brought you up and give you a conversation and hopefully then we can move forward. >> you voted for him twice. >> correct. >> right? i mean, you're a true conservative. >> a conservative, yes. >> a republican and suddenly, you were the face of this election conspiracy against the candidate of your own party, that had really taken off and i've listened to the phone call and i suspect many people here have as well and i heard you walk through that data and i've seen you sense walk through the data, why he fell short. why do you think that conspiracy and that lie resonated so much? >> i think for republicans in georgia, you have to understand that we had run the tables on the democrats since about 2002 when we changed the state from

being a democratic governor to a republican governor, governor sonny perdue, and then governor diehl and governor kemp. and that was a shock to our system. like some of the pro teams, uga, national championships, we didn't get three in a row, a shock to our system. the same idea. i think that was some of it and people just didn't accept the results and just wouldn't, you know, realize or would not just couldn't come to grips with this idea that they actually lost to a guy that hid in the basement. >> do you think it's that simple? >> there have been winners and losers since elections were invented, right? what is it about sort of the moment we're in in our history right now that is -- that is causing this type of distrust in the electoral results to

feel more pronounced than maybe it had in the past. >> normally when these situations, you get people the data, then they accept it and they walk off. they don't just doubledown, and then you give them more data and then they start, what about this? giving the answer. and then they find something else, and they just kept on doubling down and doubling down and all they really were doing was stirring up people, creating anger that somehow something had happened and that's why we continue to go out to people and let them know this is what happened is that there weren't 66,000 underage voters there were zero, there weren't thousands of felons, less than 74. every single allegations in their lawsuit we responded with facts. and we just did that calmly and respectfully with the people. in effect they were grieving for that loss and they couldn't

believe it happened. i want to talk, take it away from 2020 and we can come back to it later and i suspect when we go to the audience questions there may be some more. but the way i see it and correct me if you disagree, there are three main roles for those people in positions like yours, everseeing -- overseeing elections, three main responsibility, voter access, election security, and when you hear people complain about their mistrust in elections, they kind of tend to focus on one or some combination of those three things, so i'd love to get your thoughts on each of them. i've got a couple thoughts, but would love to hear additional ones that you may have and let's start with election administration. how confident should people be

in the way elections are administered? >> by and large, we're very good at it. a lot of people question about where we are and there are -- every county in every state probably has issues from time to time, but what they are is minor issues and generally won't affect results. i don't believe that there's widespread malicious events by county election officials. then people talk about, for example, that well, in france they can vote a whole ballot, they can count it by hand and be done that night. when you go to these parliamentary systems and french system there's only one candidate on race. in georgia we're going to have for our primary coming up in may, of 2024, probably 17,000-- actually because it's republican-democrat probably have been 34,000 different ballot styles for the entire state. just imagine that, because we're not just talking about someone running for president, we're also talking about

congress, county commissioners, state senator and even in our county, we vote for the surveyor, in glen county, vote for the water and sewer board. and america is a participatory constitution. and we have the districts overlaid on that, it's complicated, but in spite of that we're very good at it. >> one of the things in 2020 that we heard in terms of how elections are administered are a lot of angst about from some people was the move to mail in ballots, how long it took to county those, how long it took to count election day ballots, wondering why it took so long in some places and not in others. >> i would love to hear your thoughts just on that. on sort of length of time it takes to count votes and how that might impact it to improve upon that.

>> i think that 2020 was a one-off because it was covid and so what we really saw-- in fact, we had voted a week-- we had three weeks of early voting for the presidential primary, but the old laws we had in georgia, we had 16 days in early voting and we now have 17, but people had voted for about a week and a half and then georgia shut down, the country shut down as we're trying to figure out what are we going to do with covid so we then pushed the whole primary, including the rest of the presidential primary out to may, or june of 2020 and we begin that process. there's a huge upswing of absentee voting. what is that going to look like and vote absentee. they said with the absentee process in georgia and many other states, you use signature match to identify the voters, how can i trust that? we actually were sued by the democrat party prior to that, and on signature match, and

after 2020, republican party said it's subjective and since then gone to photo i.d. in minnesota, a blue state with driver's license number which is voter i.d. and that's the first aspersion cast on the absentee ballot process. but when they come in, you have to identify that, separate that ballot and get it ready to go. that's all they did. they didn't do the pre-processing up to that level. for that november race we had them do that and then actually start scanning it. you didn't tabulate, but you actually scanned it so you could press the tabulation button off the close of election. coming into the primary in june of 2020 and other states, they were doing all of that after election day, that takes sometimes two weeks to do just because it's a very labor intensive process so that

creates a lot of doubt and it's a breeding ground for conspiracy theories. so what we do now and-- well, tell you what we do now and thing about where we are, 30 to 40% in 2020 now we're back down to 6% and there's nothing that we did, it's just that covid has changed. people can vote any way they want in georgia. they can vote no excuse absentee voting, 17 day voting or election day, and people are choosing to go back to vote early 60, 65%, but now we do the pre-scanning of that before election day so all the early ballots already done. only 6%, we can get the results posted quickly. time is not your friend in the election space. the longer it takes, then all of a sudden the conspiracy, why is it taking so long. so before, 12:00 at night on election night, we will know how many ballots haven't been

count the yet so there will be 50,000, 10,000, 100,000, whatever that number is, so there's no ballot drops or ballot dumps down the road. that helps also build trust and i believe that trust is a gold standard, what we're looking for. accessibility with security, building trust, i think that really pulls our social fabric back together and we have people trying to pull it apart. >> one other thing that worries me in terms of election administration, we're seeing, since 2020, an intense targeting of election workers by conspiracy theorists. down to the most local level, right? just the volunteers. your state had now the famous case of the two election workers who sued one of the most prominent election deniers for damages, for the way they had personally been targeted.

we're seeing this across the country and a lot of experienced election workers and volunteers are walking away. it's just too much hassle. too much for them and their families to get those late night phone calls and in some states, the estimates are it's about 50% turnover or more. that's a huge brain drain of people who are well-versed, well experienced in the mechanics of running an election day operation, how worried should we be about that? >> to varying degrees, depending what state it is. the one advantage we do have in georgia is that my governor, governor kemp and i both ran for reelection in 2022. and if you want to go out and get reelected you've got to talk to people and that's a good thing. we've traveled the state and i've talked to people all over the state and explaining what happened in the election, i think for that, more people got the information, i think there

was more healing as a part of that process so it's all good so we're not seeing that huge tail off of election workers. could we use more poll workers? yes, we do. whenever i'm talking to rotary, a business chamber, i'm always saying, please, you know, who here has ever been a poll worker, show of hand and give them a round of applause for what they've done. if you haven't done that, it's the best thing you can do for everyone because i come out to vote, you come out to vote and there's no poll workers, we're going to have a long day waiting and what do we do now? it's important and i notice in oklahoma, a very strong conservative, just was signed into law roll worker protection, don't doc people's personal information and don't harass those people, what they're doing is pure, good citizenship giving back to the communities. >> let's talk about access. there are those, a lot of folks on the left, my party, who have

very serious concerns about attempts to limit access as they would see it. i'd love to, again, starting with the general question, your thoughts on how accessible the vote is, and then, you know, maybe your thoughts on some of the concerns that people have raised about voter i.d. laws, about limiting the early vote in some states. i know you can only speak for yours, but in some states you do see a shrinking of the period for the early vote or limiting the number of early vote sites. and how that feeds into mistrust of elections on the left. i'd love your thoughts on all of that. >> okay. so, what we've done is in georgia, we said we're going to give you three options, in voting, voting earlier,

election day, and you decide. you decided in georgia, 60 to 65% of georgians are voting early. some like to vote on election day and others --. >> other states might have something different. i've heard there's studies the perfect number for early voting is actually about 10 days. well, we have 17 days and i would say we have 159 counties, the second most number of counties after texas. we have a lot of counties. our smaller counties with 10,000, 15,000, they think that two weeks is plenty, but we have to have the same from all of our counties and we landed on three weeks and two saturdays. the two saturdays have been a god send. who you who votes on saturday? hardworking georgians who can't get off work monday or friday. and it gives people the option. by doing that, people get to have the choice and we think

that's the appropriate landing where we are. some states have 10 days, like president biden's state of delaware is 10 days. we're 17. we used to be a little longer, we kind of landed on here and i'm good with that. and i think that people, most georgians are comfortable where we are. other states do a little more, a little bit less, but what it really does, also, it gives the voters more options which we think is a good thing, but it also gives the county elections offices, you know, a pressure relief valve. imagine if that 65% of all early voters show up on election day? now you're up to 94, 95% how are you going to run an election all of a sudden that swamp of people coming through that? what are we supposed to do? this allows it to space out so we can manage the short lines on election day. it all works for us in georgia and that's why uga, that's okay to mention the university here? >> it's allowed. >> we're not in the big east

conference so we're okay. >> ug a & m it did a study after the 2022 cycle and over 90% of georgians we trust this, and the experience and i think that's where the sweet spot where you want to be. >> so much more questions on this and we'll circle back and i want to get to audience questions. let's talk about security, how secure are elections and sort of the three pieces of this that i'm most curious about, allegations of fraud. how much fraud is there really in our elections? >> concern over hacking and foreign interference specifically, and then misinformation/disinformation and the whole intertux of ai. many people heard the robo call on the eve of the new hampshire primary that sounded a whole heck of a lot like president

biden telling democrats not to vote. it's going to change quite a bit how we have to secure our elections. i'd love your information on hacking, misinformation, disinformation. >> going back georgia and other states did the same thing, we don't have underage voters, don't have nonregistered voters, but recently went back to the 2022 cycle and we're part of a multi-state, you know, group of states that we share voter registration records and we found 17 double voters. they voted in our state and voted in another state. you didn't think we are going to find you, we found you so we sent that to our local d.a.'s, so i don't know what happens to the other states, what they're going to do with the 17 voters in the various states, but you're talking about 17 voters that voted in two states. i believe that fraud is, in our

state and really nationwide, is not as large as people think it is. we also have photo i.d. we identify-- and we also are real i.d. compliant. if you look at your georgia driver's license number we're real i.d. compliant. if you want to register to vote the department of driver's is your services has an american citizenship check. if you're a lawful resident you can get a driver's license, but to register to vote you will be flagged as a non-american citizen. we did a robust check and 1600 people that d.d.s. flagged as noncitizens and we just want today verify were they truly non-citizens or what's their status. it's not thousands, millions, things like that. and they weren't registered to vote so we have the appropriate guardrails in place. so, we really feel comfortable about that.

and that's the most important thing. we think by having photo i.d. it gives all of you confidence and so, we can take that off, you know, making sure that we're using photo i.d. for absentee voting, not just worrying about the signature. and we're trying to elevate confidence. by doing that, it builds trust. >> talk about misinformation, disinformation and ai and how your office is thinking about that. >> we have the national associations of secretary of state meeting starts, you know, really this evening, this started and then tomorrow, over this weekend. and one of the top subjects we'll be talking about will be cyber security and now this new thing called artificial intelligence and in fact, we were up in new york and there's a fellow from an organization talking about ai and deep fakes and it's very almost, i guess you use the word, i'll use challenging, but just scare you

if-- >> i'm scared. >> it will make you -- what happens when it's so good you don't know that you're being faked out and then it gets out there in social media and before you could say no, we've checked, it's all made up, there's this hullabaloo and people are marching in the streets. what about this? what about that? so that's the concern and it really just creates more of that social stress and just lack of trust in our processes. >> in a couple of minutes i want to start bringing the audience into the conversation. we've got standing mic's in each aisle and feel free to begin lining up. while the audience does begin to line up, i want to come full circle. and look backwards a little bit. so, in 2022, that was sort after bad year for election deniers. you guys, you and governor kemp survived your reelection,

actually didn't survive, you won fairly comfortably. a lot of candidates for secretary of state or chief election administrator, whatever the role may be, across the country who were espousing the big lie lost. but they're still around. donald trump is the likely, likely to be the republican nominee. overwhelming number of republican voters still believe he won. we saw that-- we see that in poll after poll, the exit polls in iowa and new hampshire. there's about to be a change at the republican national committee and the reported front runner to take over one of the two great political parties in this country is someone who espoused the conspiracies about the 2020 election. and even in your own state, a lot of those folks in your own legislature are trying to tie

your hands a little bit, removing you from the election board and giving the board power to investigate you, sort of as retribution, some would argue. so considering that and this very real chance that donald trump will win reelection, i'm not going to ask you to endorse, i know you won't endorse in an election that you have to oversee, but if this crowd does take power, does take over, do you have concerns about the institution's holding? how do you feel about the impact of that and of the continued attacks on the institution and the people who work within it? >> if they win, they will win fair and square and if they lose, they'll lose fair and square, as simple as that.

whether they accept the results or are dancing, you know, in the streets with joy and glee, you know that's how they will respond to the win or the loss, but at the end of the day, you know, we're prepared and we'll make sure we have fair and honest elections in georgia and the other states are working towards that. we're really making sure that we have balance and accessibility with security. we're going to have photo i.d. no matter how you vote. robust citizenship checks, updating our voter rolls, we don't just pull people off. we actually make sure, have they passed away, have they moved out of the state, things like that, to a different precinct so we can update you and locate you. all of those things we'll do so we know the accuracy will never be closer, so if they win fair and square, and if they lose, they've lost fair and square. >> that mistrust resulted in violence last time.

do you have concerns about that this next time? >> i will continue to be the person that i've been and i'm going to continue to talk respectfully with the facts and i'm going to do what i need to do, which is follow the law and follow the constitution. and i really would encourage all of you to consider that. you know, sometimes we really maybe sometimes doubt where we are as a country. but this is a great country and if you hold elected office, you need to understand that you have sworn an oath to the constitution of your state and to the united states of america. but as an election, people have fought and died for our freedom. honor their sacrifice by just doing your job. that's all i can really say and that's what i pledge to do. and at the end of the day, the

beautiful thing is when you do your job, you'll be able to look in the mirror at yourself for the rest of your life 'cause you know you've done the right thing. you cut corners and you somehow listen to the crowd and don't do the right thing, you're going to know in your heart you didn't do the right thing. how you can look at yourself in the mirror. how are you going to look at your spouse, at your kids. what about when you grandkids come along some day, what are you going to be able to tell them? and i enjoy because i did the right thing, and i can enjoy a meal with my wife every night and don't have to worry about being someplace else, you know, where i don't have the choice what meal they serve in that serving line behind bars. and i think it boils down to what it is, do the right thing, but you're really honoring every person who has ever served, ever fought, and the founders that, you know, devised this constitution, people say it's not perfect. guess what? you can make it more perfect.

you're here in georgetown, you'll figure it out, but it takes a lot of work for these constitutional amendments, but just continue to be good people of integrity and it will all work out. >> they're going to have better questions than mine so let's go to them, though i do reserb the right to jump back in. and when i point to you, tell us your name, what you're studying and ask a question in the form after question. >> hi, secretary raffensperger, thank you for joining us today. i'm an amar'e, studying business and global affairs and the question is the same theme just brought up. consistently polled 2020, all the way up to 2024. 60 to 70% of republicans still believe that the 2020 election was illegitimate and that president joe biden did not win the election, which to me is a little unfathomable, i can't wrap my head around it. so my question to you is, is that something we should be

concerned about and assuming it is, what do we need to do to change that? >> i think we have to also keep in mind in 2020 that was just a once in a century event and there's a lot going on and a lot of different little parts and more people voted absentee than ever did before. people are going to go back to their traditional ways of voting and i think they'll probably feel a lot more comfortable. there's a lot of nervousness about absentee voting, mail-in voting in other states and i think you're going to see that people go back to the historical patterns like we have in georgia. we have shored up, you know, any questions that we may have had, things that we wanted. i always thought it made more sense to use driver's license as photo i.d. and take it off the table so don't get sued by the democrats and republicans, there, take that off the table and we've elevated confidence in that process. so i think that's a lot of it, i think we're back to a normal process. campaigns will both say what

they're saying. their job is to turn out people. and i'm going to make sure that i have even more data quicker because really what happened in georgia, the simple answer is that 33,000 people that voted in the republican primary in june, 2020, did not come out to vote in the fall race and that's on the campaign. you know who votes in most political parties campaigns and that's public data and the campaigns had that and every day they could have said who has voted early already and who requested absentee ballot, have they turned that in? and follow that, there's 33,000 people that haven't voted yet, you call them on election day, call them at 7 a.m., at 8:00, send someone to pick them up, bob, do you need a ride to the polling location, they could have gone ahead and worked those people and they didn't. they left them out there stranded. that's on them, but the people then skip the top of the ticket, 27,900 people skipped the top top of the ticket and

voted down ballot and we know that because a republican congressman in georgia got 27,550 more votes and that actually-- tail off what you had at the top and the republican congressmen did it better that happened in many other states. and you get the facts out and talk to people and say, this is about the campaigns. the ooh he-- the election directors and officials will be ready for you. you want to be sure if you want to win the race, get your people out for both sides. their jobs and campaigns are to turn people out. our job is to make sure we have fair, honest, accurate elections. >> thank you. >> thanks, over here. >> good evening, secretaries. my name is kai. i'm from idaho here studying international politics and as a republican i have a lot of respect for you. a while ago i read this article about how a lot of-- about how some republican-led states have been pulling out of, i believe it's called the eric voting registration system, and i was kind of

wondering, do you think that some of our party's efforts that are advertised as making our elections more secure are actually making them less secure? >> the electronic registration center, eric was formed by the states. we weren't one of the founders, virginia was and a group of them has come together with a multi-state consortium, to share the voting records and protocol. they were doing that and all of a sudden, you know, this social media operation came out and disparaged what was happening. the people that funded eric were actually the members of eric and states pulled out. i say we're not pulling out so we're still members of eric, but the states that pull out, say, alabama now i've done a bilateral with alabama and doing one with virginia and three other states and we'll do bilaterals. every state that's not a member, but some states already weren't members because of the

cost, for example, nebraska, we'll look at doing a bilateral with them, but the department of driver services, they're a protective. and we have the information driving, when people get a driver's license and 49 states and district of columbia, and get a driver's license in texas, nebraska, illinois, we're going to find out about that and then we're going to say, well, why would they have a driver's license in illinois? we'll reach out and find out have you moved to illinois and then we're also getting death records and other forms so we actually right now in georgia because we're part of this multi-state organization, we get those records, plus, we have the department of driver's services and bilaterals, and we actually have the best records in the entire country. in fact, heritage, which is a conservative foundation, so if you're on the left side, you don't care about heritage, but heritage is on the right side of the aisle. we were ranked number one for

election integrity. go figure, that must blow some people's minds because we struck the proper balance of accessibility with security. and the bipartisan policy institute gave us high marks as well as colorado tied for number one. >> thank you. >> thanks. >> hi, secretary. my name is robbie, i am a junior studying both computer science and government at georgetown. i'm from marietta, georgia, lived in georgia my entire life and as a georgia resident, i rely heavily on the absentee ballot, and ordered one a few days ago. >> awesome, with as it easy. >> pretty easy, got to hand it to you. [laughter]. >> you're welcome. [laughter]. >> certainly had a big part of it, the chief operator officer, a shout out later. >> it was very easy.

>> we have a great team. >> my big question is relating to a lot of the changes that happened in 2021 and a lot of that was through the legislature to my knowledge and not necessarily the executive branch. but one of those big changes was, it shortened the window that people could request ballots and also the window that counties could mail out ballots by about half, approximately half and i was just curious because that makes it more challenging for students like me because we have shorter windows. i was curious if you could maybe speak on the rationale behind that and the pros and cons. >> it was designed for two reasons, one, we found that voters were requesting it out so early in the cycle before that they actually sometimes would misremember and then they would send in another application, it was gumming up the works for county elections operations. that's the issue there. we found out you could request your ballot, you know, so late

in the cycle that you would never get it and what we found out, and that's why we ended up on the 10-day window that you had to get your ballot back and request 10 days before. if you got it in 10 days before we could process the application, get you your ballot and get it back because we found out, after-- before 10 days it was like a 92% acceptance rate and after 10 days it was only 50%, 54% i believe was the number and in effect, you're disenfranchising voters. it was almost unfair what you did to a voter. he was going to request it three days before. hey, i'm sorry, champ, but you're not going to get it in time because the post office, there's nothing that, you know, you've done wrong, it's just so late. but it made sure that we didn't disenfranchise voters to improve the process and that's why we did that. >> thanks. >> hi, secretary, thank you for coming to speak with us today. my name is ben doolin, i'm a

senior in the college from new york majoring in physics and classics, and my question to you is how is your education and background in engineering influenced your development as a politician and the way you approach policy making, particularly related large scale systems such as election integrity and expanding voting access. >> well, the one thing about elections is, you just have to know how to add because that's what it's really all about, right. so i don't have to use analysis, i don't have to use moment distribution and these kind of engineering theorems. it's about adding up numbers, how many did this person get, that person get. but i'm good with numbers and i guess i'm really logical and i just try and think through things, how do we improve the

process, how do we make incremental improvements and i think that's one things that engineers do. it's always looking at how do you build a better bridge, how do you build a better building. and walking through washington d.c., a frame holding in the structure and the center was taking down and i'm thinking what they're doing there and thinking about the process at all times. that's how we think. i think that's really good for someone in this area and as secretary of state, we also had corporations and professional licensing. i'm a licensed civil engineers and also contractor and i recognize how important professional licensing is and corporations are. and we have securities and charities. if you have a charity in georgia, i want a real charity where 50% or more, hopefully 80%, 90% is going out to the mission field not going in your back pocket and you're making $3 million a year and the charity's getting nothing. so, it really just kind of fit in my wheel house.

so i think it's a great place, great place with a guy with a physics agree and computer science. computer science, don't do ai, do good things not bad things, direct your energies towards the positives in life. >> thank you. >> thanks. >> hi, my name is allie, i'm a sophomore in college of sciences and double major, also from marietta crazily, that doesn't happen often at georgetown. the 2022 midterms, in my county, cobb county, about a thousand absentee ballots ended up they weren't mailed out. i'm sure you know about it. i guess my question is how do you interact with county level elections offices, how are they being supported/what -- how does that look like, i guess? how do you make sure that all of them are working and doing the things they're supposed to do.

>> that's really interesting, this is a georgia issue, but throughout georgia we have 159 election directors and in cobb county you actually have one of the best. janine everler was fantastic and someone in her team, you know, didn't have the experience and that's really where there's no substitute for experience, didn't have the experience, but she didn't throw that person under the bus and didn't try to push it on us. and she took full responsibility, and that's her character. and this is what happened with our group and where are the people and they're sending the stuff out, federal express, next day air, how do we make, how do we get that back to them. tremendous, now, recouping of what had happened. it really spoke highly of her character, yes, their office had this mistake, but she had been there for many years and was an outstanding person and since retired, but i want to commend her for her years of

dedicated service for people of georgia and for her county. >> hi, secretary. thank you for being here. i'm jordan park, a freshman in the college of arts and sciences from seattle, washington. my question has to do with, kind of comes back to the issue of elections and my impression, if you think the way districting is handled for electoral votes has any impact on faith in elections? >> i think that redistricting is one of those issues that we now have a lot of districts that once you win your primary, then you're probably going to be the nominee. we few hinge districts. there's not a lot of movement in that. some people say well, should we have nonpartisan redistricting commission? trust me, if it has something to do with elections it's not going to be nonpartisan for long because if they put moe in that district and redirecting commission and he says i'm nonpartisan, no, he's not and neither am i. so, that's the challenge, so i

believe that the general assembly should do the best that they can because if they overstep their bounds, it will all of a sudden get before a court and then the court's going to say, no, no, we can't-- we're not buying that so they looked at georgia and we had to tweak some of the lines and they looked at alabama, so, i think the general assembly by and large know their p's and q's and they kind of mind what they should be doing so i think that's the best way forward and other states have different things and that's a legislative decision because they'll determine, you know, how that ends up happening. i think at the end of the day, you know, if no matter what district it is, if you have a candidate that doesn't behave himself, they will not be reelected. >> along with another reform, electoral reform that people talk about that proponents argue would trust in election is ranked-choice voting.

your legislature just voted against expanding it, right, against expanding ranked-choice voting and if i'm correct you were personally not in favor of ranked-choice voting or supported that. i haven't taken a position on it. what i've said is in georgia, we have runoffs and we have runoffs of everything and i'm the runoff champion in america, been in four of them, city house, two for secretary of state, one or the primary and one's for the fall so i know how they work they create a tremendous burden because we have a full week runoff in november. if we have one in november of 2024, guess what it butts up to? thanksgiving. the end of the race in november we're having the ballots that come in by friday at noon or 1:00 and then we have to go ahead and, every tie and everything like that, and we have to do audits before we can certify, not just one race like we did in 2020, it will be

other races like state house, state senator, county commissioner, all of that takes time and then you have a runoff and the county says we want you to get rid of runoffs. we don't care how you do that, your job is to legislate. and that's what i told them, your job is to legislate and so far they've refused to do so, that's their decision, it's on them. >> every here. >> hi, thank you, once again, mr. secretary for coming out. my name is ethan, majoring in international politics, i'm junior here not from georgia, but north carolina, just down the road. my question is in preparation for this talk i went back and relistened to the very famous, the perfect phone call, if you will, and-- i know. and always a lot of things that were very shocking about that interaction. i was wondering if you could tell us more about the leadup to that interaction and the leadup to that fateful day in

january, late december, i don't remember exactly when it was, and what the buildup was like, how he reached out, what the communication was like prior and everything that led up to that moment? >> well, i know that they want today talk to us for a little bit. someone sent me a text. they said -- it came from this e-mail nc congressman at gmail.com or something like that and texted it to me so it wasn't an e-mail, it was a text. but mark meadows, your voice mail is full. give me a call. he didn't give me a phone number and so i didn't call him. and i didn't primarily because we were running an election and when i was on city council, what we were-- was beaten into our heads, whenever you're doing an investigation, if you have any questions, city council members do not get involved in that

investigation. if you have any questions, you get to the city manager and in effect, we have 20, 25 plus certified investigators and we had a lot of investigations going on about these allegations and i really didn't want to enter into conversations with a lot of people as-- i didn't want them or me interfering with an investigation. let our investigators do their work. so i didn't have the number so i didn't call. i got another one later and it gave me the call for the white house switchboard. it still didn't really know it was them based on the e-mail address. i thought maybe it's a deep fake, maybe it's borat. i'm going to assume it's borat and i'm not calling because i didn't know what good would come out of it. finally, neil cavuto asked me some questions on fox news and i shared those data points and apparently president trump didn't like hearing that and so, mark meadows insisted to my deputy that we have a call that day i said, well, if we're

going to do that i want my general counsel on the call, my deputy was there and then the white house and they had all of their people on the call. and i mean, they had on, we had the general counsel, jordan and myself and we had at that conversation for about one hour and eight minutes. >> just about right. >> thanks. >> hi secretary raffensperger. my name is na dean, a government and computer science major from south jersey. so you said time is not your friend and to me this screams kind of further digitalization of election process. i think a robust voting system that's digital could do the work faster and take the burden off poll workers. so let's say-- not now, but 10 years from now we have a voting system that works on your personal devices, my mom uses her mac to vote,

something like that, and let's say it's secure from foreign interference, easier said than done, but let's say. you know a lot about public trust in elections, would this ever work? >> it's interesting you said that because we've been sued 10 times by the stacey abrams camp and ten times by the trump camp, plus or minus. and i met somebody i think he came out of pitt cyber, one of those schools and talked about what the next generation of elections could look like and he said, you know, brad, this next generation is going to want to vote by their phones because that's how they've grown up, but we're not there yet because of security. that's where we're headed once we figure out security that's where we're go. he was throwing out about 2035, 10 years down the road so that's your-- i'm going to assign you that right now. you'll probably make a billion

dollars with this idea, you'll do a great job. but he says, once you establish the security in that, he said it's actually could be very powerful because it puts the voter back in charge from the standpoint up until closing at 7 p.m. you can go ahead and you can vote at 7 a.m. go into the office. and the boss man, the union boss or boss that owns the company owns the whole town you never know, it's a wonderful life, a great movie. when you have the whole town, and you own the whole town, and shows how did you vote, you show, if i wanted you to vote for mary and you voted for bob, you change itten send button and puts them back in charge. and never thought it it from that standpoint. so we're not there yet.

we're waiting for you to keep out deep fakes and outside threats that we have. we'll probably get that at some point when people have 100% confidence in that device. >> i remember the 2000 election and the debacle down in florida with the hanging chads and all of that. and the response to make sure that never happened again was to move towards electronic voting and touch screen machines went up all over the country. i was managing a campaign in florida in 2022, the first statewide election after 2000 and the election administrators hadn't thought about simple things and used the same locations, but hadn't thought about whether there enough outlets so the polls had to open late. but we moved towards electronic voting because of an erosion of trust in the old system. now there's a rapid move towards making sure there's a

paper trail, right, because people have lost -- and so i think it's a fascinating question and a fascinating idea but will we always kind of teeter back and forth when it comes to which system we trust? is there a way to sort of alleviate those concerns that people just tend to have about the process? >> perhaps. because if we ever reach the day where we can trust 100% of the politicians, i don't know if you can trust 100% of those campaign managers. that's the next thing, i trust these people, but i don't know about -- because there's too much to lose if you don't win a race, but we're not there yet so today we're just going to make sure that we have a verifiable paper ballot and do 100% audit of any race we have in the state of georgia and over 90% of all the states in america, that the paper ballot had this upcoming election. you'll be able to audit anything, pull up the stacks

and one for candidate a, one for candidate b, one for candidate c and verify that with the machine count that you had on election night and you'll have a number of pieces of paper and you'll then know, this was a fair and accurate election and this person won, this person lost. >> thanks for the question. we're almost out of time and two people left in line so let's see if we can't squeeze them. >> i'll be quick. >> you guys be quick, too. >> okay. good evening, thank you for being here, i'm a freshman in the school of health, studying health care management and policy, i'm also from georgia, from duluth georgia and we spoke a bunch with the other georgia students and you spoke then and now about your journey into politics first as engineer city council, state house now as secretary of state. and i was kind of intrigued why did you want to run for secretary of state? out of all positions, why not governor, per se.

what was special about secretary of state? >> during-- we had electronic voting and we needed, i thought, and want today move us towards that, in fact all the republicans did and i think all the democrats candidates knew that we need today get a new system in place and i wanted a verifiable paper ballot, a multi-state organization to have accurate voter rolls and only american citizens would vote in our elections. the number one concern we have right now in spite-- with the open borders nationwide, both people on both sides of the aisle making sure that only american citizens are voting in our elections. and improve licensing and corporations, you can corporation up to three years in georgia, one, two, three years, we have give georgia choices not just for elections, but corporations and licensing. a great place for business owners accomplish something and

work hard to make things better for your fellow georgians. >> thank you. >> let's squeeze in last one, if you're good. >> hi, my name is joe, i went to emery undergrad so i lived in georgia and voted in georgia for a few years before moving here for medical school. i wanted to ask, knowing there are a number of republicans who refute donald trump's lies regarding the election of 2020, and a number in your state who wholeheartedly support those lies, do you believe this split and disunity within the republican party in georgia causes weakness in the party? >> well, i think abraham lincoln said it best, a house divided against itself does not stand. it's unhealthy where we are, but we're standing on integrity. what are we supposed to do. we can't move because we know we're following the law and following the constitution and i'll continue to do so. >> thank you. >> you've got a book, integrity

counts. i haven't read it because you just gave it to me before we walked out on stage, but i encourage everyone to grab it. i've heard great things about this book. our motto here at the institute, our slogan, when you go to our website at the institute of politics and public service is public service is a good thing. politics can be, too. it's tested quite often whether or not that's true, but one of the things we learned here at georgetown from day one is that we're all men and women for others and if we bring that spirit in, politics can be, too. we don't believe in everything politically, mr. secretary, but i believe you bring that spirit of service to your job each and every day. thank you so much for sharing some of that with us here tonight. >> thank you, mo. >> thank you, and thank all of you. [applause] >> please keep an eye out to

politics for upcoming events and we have a we can from thursday in gaston hall where former congressman val deming a fellow in our current program will conversing, about whether or not gen z is ready to take the reins of power. thanks so much, everybody. thank you, mr. secretary. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] ... ...