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Sitting in his office in Georgia’s gold-domed Capitol, Brad Raffensperger said he was proud his state “protected the vote.”
Raffensperger was on the receiving end of the phone call after the 2020 election in which then-President Donald Trump pressured him over and over to change the outcome in Georgia, saying, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”
To the soft-spoken engineer turned secretary of state, that’s all past now. His office was decorated with a patriotic eagle painting, given to him after he stood up to Trump’s pressure. His state, he contended, emerged with elections that are even more secure and accessible.
As Raffensperger spoke, though, just one floor above him speakers had filled the state elections board meeting to overcapacity. Suspicious of the Dominion-made voting machines, they lined up to demand paper ballots. “Until we can get rid of these machines,” attendee Jeff Jolly said outside, ”our winners are handpicked by a small group here in this building.”
About a mile from the Capitol is ground zero for some of the claims of election fraud: State Farm Arena, where election staff working around the clock at a vote tabulation center were then falsely accused of being “election scammers.” Their defamation lawsuit against Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is still in court.
And just outside Raffensperger’s windows, almost visible, were the orange traffic barricades and police cars ringing the Fulton County Courthouse. There, a grand jury indictment in the investigation of efforts to overturn the 2020 vote was expected any day – an indictment that could come as early as Tuesday and may well include Trump himself.
To some Georgians, a Trump indictment would be a step toward justice; to others, a sign of just how broken the system is. But no matter the indictment, or any trial, or the desire many people here have to move on, there’s no outcome that seems likely to lift the shadow of 2020.
Voting rights advocates say the election and its aftermath left an enduring imprint on access, election politics and simple trust in Georgia, one of America’s most pivotal swing states.
They point chiefly to the state’s sweeping overhaul of elections in 2021. Republican legislators said the changes brought election security. Voter advocates and civil rights leaders say it built lasting barriers to voting access – an attempt, they believe, to undercut the growing clout of Democrats and Black voters.
The state also allowed unlimited citizen challenges to other people’s voter registrations – and right-wing activists filed so many, they swamped some election offices. Election offices were banned from seeking outside funding, which opponents viewed as unfairly helping Democratic counties. After years of threats and intimidation, election and poll workers are scarce.
For some voters – left to make sense of nearly three years of conflicting messages and investigations, of allegations and legislation – all this makes them push a little harder. They know the state that was under fire for voter access issues even before 2020. The year’s fallout fuels their determination to vote.
That’s not true for others, though, who have become convinced the outcome is decided by forces beyond the ballot box.
“A lot of this really goes back to the big lie – the idea that something was wrong with our election and our electoral system, and it has to change. And of course, we all know that’s not true,» said Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University election law professor. “Yet major pieces of public policy have been shifted in response to that lie.”A land of surveillance video, allegations and threats
Outside an Atlanta coffee shop in early August, Richard Barron recalled the night he got a text from a reporter asking him how he felt.
Barron had no idea what she was talking about, but he soon would understand.
Donald Trump, then the outgoing president, had held a rally in Valdosta, Georgia, to support the Republican in the hotly contested runoff election for the state’s Senate seat. He had fired off false conspiracy theories about stolen elections and voter fraud, and had flashed Barron’s picture on the big screen.
Next came a flood of new threats. One message warned Barron he’d be “served lead.”
“That’s when I really started getting harassment,” he recalled. “I finally got a police officer to stay outside the house when I would sleep at night.”
It’s not as if Barron, Fulton County’s elections director, had never been embattled. Long before, he had faced problems with lines at polling places, administrative snafus and other issues.
He led the department during 2018’s bitter governor’s race, when Stacey Abrams narrowly lost to then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp. Officials rejected hundreds of absentee ballots. Democrats claimed voter suppression. Lawsuits continued for years.
The following year, Georgia purchased a new voting system made by a company that would soon be a household name: Dominion Voting Systems. The year after that, the COVID-19 pandemic put mail-in ballots into broad use.
Meanwhile, the stakes of elections in Georgia were mounting. The once reliably red state became a swing state that put 16 electoral votes up for grabs.
When Biden narrowly won Georgia in November − the first Democrat to win the state since 1992 – Trump alleged fraud. Among his targets were Fulton County, the state’s most populous county.
After Trump demanded a hand recount, a statewide hand recount and a subsequent recount found Biden had won by about 12,000 votes.
But Trump’s claims continued. There were allegations of manipulated ballots. Fraud. Supposedly breached election equipment. Soon, Trump allies like Giuliani and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were visiting Georgia.
In the months after the election, Barron’s staff faced pressure like never before.
Meeting with Georgia lawmakers that December, Giuliani played surveillance footage that included two of Barron’s employees – Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss – at State Farm Arena.
Giuliani said the footage showed the women “surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine,” the Associated Press reported.
What they were actually passing, as Moss would later explain to the Jan. 6 congressional committee, was a ginger mint. But the threats against them exploded.
Trump, in his infamous phone call to Georgia, would falsely call Freeman an “election scammer” at least 18 times.
They were forced to leave their home for two months at the urging of the FBI.
Moss, who is Black, said she received messages “wishing death upon me. Telling me that I’ll be in jail with my mother. And saying things like ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’”
“There is nowhere I feel safe,” Freeman told the congressional committee.
This June, a Georgia investigation of the allegations of fraud at the State Farm Arena ballot processing center cleared the two women of any wrongdoing.
Biden’s inauguration didn’t end the pressure. Barron said he continued to take criticism from state elections officials and some local politicians. Fulton County, at the behest of Republican legislators, became the first county in Georgia to undergo a new performance review. Barron’s office faced a possible state takeover.
Finally, in late 2021, he resigned.
Barron, nearly two years later, got through an entire coffee drink on a coffee shop patio near Atlanta’s Ponce City Market as he recounted the years of tumult.
The partisan acrimony took a toll.
