Raffensperger Sued Over Falsehoods About Election Volunteer

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is facing a powerful defamation lawsuit arising from false claims he made about a Republican election volunteer in his 2021 book “Integrity Counts.” He wrote and published that a video presentation of unsupervised ballot counting at State Farm Arena in Atlanta had been “doctored,” “chopped up,” “cut,” “sliced up,” and “deceptively sliced and edited so that it appeared to show the exact opposite of reality,” allegedly including a “slice of video that had removed the clear evidence” that the law had been followed.

None of that was true. Jacki Pick, a Republican volunteer on the Trump legal team, was the sole presenter of the video to Georgia legislators to show that Republican election observers’ claims about unsupervised ballot counting in Georgia’s largest county were true. While she did not show the entire 20 hours of the video in her 12-minute presentation, nothing she showed was edited, chopped up, sliced, or diced, in any way.

Raffensperger published the self-promotional book in November 2021 as part of his campaign for re-election. It came a year after he oversaw one of the most controversial state elections of 2020. He had faced a deluge of criticism from election integrity advocates over various decisions he and his office made in the run up to and aftermath of the 2020 election.

For example, in March 2020, Raffensperger succumbed to the legal efforts of Democrat activist Marc Elias to water down signature verification requirements for mail-in ballots. After several Democrat counties poorly administered primary elections in 2020, Raffensperger voluntarily embraced “Zuck Bucks,” the scheme by which Democrat operatives took over government election operations in the blue areas of swing states and helped run Get Out The Vote programs. Georgia was the primary target of the operation, receiving $45 million from the Center for Tech and Civic Life. The results were remarkable.

Georgia went from a more than five point margin of victory for Republicans in 2016 to narrow loss in 2020. Raffensperger’s office immediately went into a defensive posture, rejecting information requests from Republican activists, refusing to investigate legitimate claims of illegal voting, and even fabricating Trump quotes that were cited in his impeachment. They also illegally recorded a key phone call they held with the Trump campaign, mischaracterized the context of the call, and immediately leaked it to the Washington Post. These and other actions have led election integrity activists to view the entire Georgia Secretary of State office with suspicion and frustration.

No Georgia county had more problems in 2020 than the notoriously corrupt Fulton County. The county had so many problems with administering elections that they were under a consent decree from the U.S. Department of Justice. Among other problems in 2020, officials at its central vote tabulation facility had told the media and partisan election observers that they were done for the night only to continue counting after the observers and media had left. Republicans were outraged.

Raffensperger’s office downplayed the concerns and repeatedly said nothing was amiss. He and his representatives at first denied that any media or observers had been told operations had stopped for the evening (despite ample evidence they had been told), then they said that no counting took place after observers left, and then they claimed that government monitors had been present the entire time. In early December 2020, Trump attorneys found security footage of the arena that showed those claims were false. The presentation of that security video footage went viral before left-wing censorship outlets were able to suppress the story and falsely claim it had been debunked.

CNN and New York Times Pile On

In August of 2024, Raffensperger ran to his allies at left-wing propaganda outlets The New York Times and CNN to have them mischaracterize the defamation lawsuit and help him personally raise money to fight it. “Defying Trump Over Election Costs a Republican, Literally,” blared the front page headline of the New York Times, which claimed that he had spent $500,000 to fight the lawsuit.

In fact, the lawsuit has nothing to do with “defying Trump” in 2020. Rather it deals with the words Raffensperger published one year later in his book about Pick’s video presentation.

New York Times activist Nick Corasaniti uncritically regurgitates Raffensperger’s claim that Pick demands he take a particular view of the 2020 election. That is, of course, false. She merely requires in her suit that he retract false statements he made about her in his 2021 book and pay damages for the reputational harm he caused her. Her lawsuit provides many examples of left-wing media allies repeating his false claims of deceptive editing and false testimony.

Raffensperger “has been forced to spend half a million dollars defending himself in court for having stood up to former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” the Corasaniti asserts without evidence. Again, Raffensperger is in court over the false statements he published in his 2021 book, not for how his office illegally recorded phone calls and leaked them to their political allies in left-wing media, or any other action against Trump.

Corasaniti without evidence characterizes the video presentation made by Pick as having included “debunked … claims of election fraud.” In fact, her presentation showed undeniable evidence of unsupervised ballot counting in a county known for troubled election administration.

“Ms. Pick’s lawyers let it be known that if Mr. Raffensperger wanted to settle the case, he would first have to say publicly that her presentation of the video was not deceptive. In other words, Mr. Raffensperger says, he would effectively have to tell his own new lie,” Corasaniti writes. At no point do he or Raffensperger make a case for why accurately noting the video presentation was not deceptive would be a lie. Further, at no point does Corasaniti provide any evidence of anything deceptive about the video presentation.

Corasaniti than claims that victims of defamation suing could be a threat to election officials getting their work done. Again, Raffensperger is being sued not for his work as an election official but for his personal 2021 book in which he defamed Pick.

“Ms. Pick never once asked Mr. Raffensperger to make statements regarding the 2020 election; her only concern is in repairing her damaged reputation caused by false statements made by Mr. Raffensperger in 2021, a full year later.  Ms. Pick will hold Mr. Raffensperger accountable for making false statements about her, and the fact he’s more interested in diverting attention to a 2020 election narrative that portrays him favorably and away from addressing his 2021 defamatory statements shows he is extremely concerned that justice will be served,” said Bill Whitehill, a member of her legal team.