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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 27, 2023
Contact: Marilyn Marks
Coalition for Good Governance
Marilyn@uscgg.org
704 292 9802
Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger Fights Federal Court Order to Testify About Voting System Security
ATLANTA- Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has appealed a federal court’s ruling ordering him to testify in the upcoming trial of the long-running Curling v. Raffensperger lawsuit, slated for trial beginning January 9. Coalition for Good Governance (“CGG”) and its co-plaintiffs are seeking Secretary Raffensperger’s trial testimony concerning his public claims regarding the security of the touchscreen voting system.
Despite regularly speaking about the lawsuit and publicly dismissing the plaintiffs’ concerns, Raffensperger has refused to testify under oath in Curling. On December 20th, over his objections, and citing inconsistences in Raffensperger’s public statements about the January 2021 statewide voting system breaches, the court granted plaintiffs’ request for his testimony. The court ruled that Raffensperger must testify for 75 minutes regarding Georgia’s voting system security, and what the Secretary knew about voting system software breaches initiated in Coffee County, Georgia.
In its order the court found that, “Some of the Secretary’s statements are inconsistent with other public statements from the Secretary of State’s Office about when they State knew of the Coffee County breach and the steps it took to investigate the breach.”
In a 2022 television interview, Raffensperger contradicted prior statements from his office by claiming that he first learned of the January 2021 breaches shortly after they occurred and that his investigators had been investigating and ‘digging deep’ into the breach events since early 2021. He further stated that his office learned in the spring of 2021 that the voting system passwords had been "shared with an outside company."
In contrast, in April 2022, Raffensperger’s counsel had represented to the federal court that his office first learned of illicit voting system access in February 2022, and that its investigation began immediately thereafter. Similarly, then-deputy secretary of state Gabe Sterling and other representatives stated that the office knew nothing of these events until Spring 2022. Raffensperger’s office later stated that they commenced their investigation in July 2022. But the Secretary’s office has been unable to produce any evidence of an investigation commencing before August 2022, when they asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to undertake a criminal investigation.
In late April 2022, Gabe Sterling insisted that the Coffee breaches simply “did not happen!”
Shortly after the December 20 court order to testify at the upcoming trial, Secretary Raffensperger and the Republican-controlled State Election Board, appealed the decision requiring Raffensperger’s testimony, with a petition to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and also filed an emergency motion with the district court seeking a stay of the order for his testimony. Secretary Raffensperger and the State Election Board argued that he is too busy to testify to defend the voting system or explain his claims about the Coffee County breach investigation he says his office undertook early in 2021.
“Since Atlanta NBC affiliate 11 Alive published the September 2022 story and video interview with Secretary Raffensperger demonstrating his office’s inability to keep their Coffee breach stories straight, the conflicting stories have been begging for truthful answers,” said Marilyn Marks, Executive Director, Coalition for Good Governance, one of the plaintiffs in the Curling litigation. “Gabe Sterling has tried to avoid these questions and even accused 11 Alive of ‘ambushing’ Raffensperger by daring to raise the topic of the Coffee breaches and ask what he knew and when it knew it. Such questions have been lingering without answers for almost two years. It is long past time for Secretary Raffensperger to explain under oath his office’s handling of the largest voting system breach in the nation’s history.”
The plaintiffs’ filing with the district court states that Secretary Raffensperger’s testimony is essential to learn the basis of key decisions he personally made concerning the touchscreen voting system and its security. CGG has objected to numerous claims Secretary Raffensperger has made, such as his assertion that voters can verify that their individual ballot was accurately counted, or that audits of BMD ballot elections prove that machines do not flip votes. CGG notes that Secretary Raffensperger did not disclose the highly relevant Coffee breaches to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol in his November 30, 2021 testimony. Plaintiffs challenge multiple claims regarding Georgia’s voting system security made by Raffensperger in that Congressional testimony.
The Curling v. Raffensperger trial is scheduled to begin January 9 in federal district court in Atlanta. Plaintiffs seek to have the court enjoin the use of the touchscreen components of the voting system, and instead have Georgia use the system in its traditional and more secure configuration to scan and tabulate hand marked paper ballots. Plaintiffs obtained such a victory against Georgia’s use of paperless touchscreen machines in an earlier phase of the case in 2019.
“Georgia’s highly contentious 2024 elections must be conducted in a secure and transparent manner to avoid dangerous and endless controversy about the results,” Marks said. “The only feasible method of conducting such a verifiable election is the widely-accepted use of scanners to tabulate ballots marked by hand. Seventy percent of Americans vote in this manner, which permits rapid reporting of results and post-election audits to confirm the outcomes. Our primary focus is to ensure that Georgia’s 2024 election is free from the post-election controversy and chaos that Georgia’s unverifiable touchscreen system invites.”
Coalition for Good Governance is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on election security, integrity, and transparency.
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