- GA Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger told Insider that misinformation is eroding the electoral process.
- "Candidates are blame-shifting and trying to find excuses when the candidate just came up short," he said.
- Raffensperger also kept mum on whether he would vote for Trump as a potential 2024 GOP nominee.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told Insider that "a basis of misinformation and disinformation campaigns," are the biggest threats to upcoming elections in the US in an interview last month.
Raffensperger spoke to Insider after releasing his new book "Integrity Counts," which is a memoir of his life and political career, with a behind-the-scenes focus on the two months between Election Day 2020 and his infamous January 2 phone call with President Donald Trump.
Raffensperger also spoke extensively to Insider's Grace Panetta about the dueling political landscape in Georgia — comparing Stacey Abrams and Donald Trump — also writing about how the loss of his son propelled his political career.
In the book, he also describes a way forward for the GOP, charging that certain leaders in the party have lost their "moral compass" for endorsing lies about voter fraud.
When asked about the biggest threat to his own reelection race as well as races across the country, Raffensperger told Insider, "I really think it's a basis of misinformation and disinformation campaigns, where candidates or their consultants are blame-shifting and trying to find excuses when the candidate just came up short."
In January, Raffensperger was asked by former President Donald Trump to "find" 11,780 votes to overturn the state's 2020 election results, a move which Raffensperger said led to weeks of death threats to him and his family. Recently, he said those threats have petered out.
Raffensperger said that he believes election disinformation is increasing across the political spectrum and that it "undermines voter confidence, and it leads into more cynical, anger-based discussions."
"What really tells the whole story quickly is there were 28,000 Georgians who skipped the presidential ballot and yet, they voted down-ballot," Raffensperger added.
Raffensperger, who voted for Trump in 2020, declined to answer whether he would vote for Trump in 2024 if he were to be the GOP nominee, which he also declined to rule out during an MSNBC interview.
"My book is very clear that I'm going to have a standard in how I evaluate every candidate with a certain ethical, moral standard," he told Insider. "So my book stands on its own and my principals stand on their own."
Raffensperger will have to court a big tent of Republican voters during his reelection campaign in 2022 — which could include Trump loyalists who wrongly hold Raffensperger responsible for the former president losing the state.
"I think people, everyone that runs for office should make sure that they have a positive message and are trying to bring people together to grow their base so that they can get over 50% of the vote," he said.
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