MSNBC
- Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said both Republicans and Democrats need to acknowledge "when you lose, you lose."
- The Georgia official compared efforts by Republicans to overturn the 2020 election to complaints of voter suppression from Democrats.
- Raffensperger became a target of former President Donald Trump after he denied his request to "find" 11,780 votes to overturn the 2020 presidential election
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger issued a message to both Republicans and Democrats frustrated by election losses: "Move on."
Speaking to MSNBC's Jonathan Capehart on Sunday, Raffensperger said both Republicans and Democrats can be blamed for distrust in public elections.
"We have safe and secure elections. It's not helpful for either party, I think either party needs to look at what they're saying and just realize that when you lose, you lose," Raffensperger told Capehart.
Raffensperger said Stacey Abrams, who ran for Governor of Georgia in 2018 but lost, "set the table for President Trump" to make similar claims of election fraud. At the time, Abrams said she would have won the election were it not for voter suppression in Georgia.
Abrams' opponent who went on to become governor, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, was both a candidate in the race and the one overseeing the election process. The New York Times reported in 2018 that Kemp "oversaw purges of the voting rolls and supported a tightening of registration rules."
Abrams ended her campaign but refused to formally concede the race, claiming that voter suppression prevented her win.
"If you really look at what Stacey Abrams did, she lost the state of Georgia in 2018 by 55,000 votes. She questioned the legitimacy of our elections. She actually then set the table, along with all the national democrat leaders that supported Stacy Abrams in her big lie, and set the table for President Trump then just to ramp it up and take it to the next level," Raffensperger said in an interview on Saturday with MSNBC's Ali Velshi.
"Voter suppression and voter fraud, they're both sides of that coin, different sides, but stolen election claims undermine people's confidence in the elections," Raffensperger continued, saying there was no voter suppression in that election.
On Sunday, Capehart pushed back on Raffensperger's narrative, which an MSNBC blogger said was "sucking up to Trump with attacks on Stacey Abrams."
"Is it not dangerous and disingenuous to equate questioning legitimate voter suppression with false claims of voter fraud? And couldn't you be doing more to convince voters that our elections are safe and secure?" Capehart asked.
"Elections are safe and secure in Georgia, and I think it's really disingenuous when the left does not really fess up to the part that they play when Hillary Clinton and all those other people supported Stacy Abrams when she said she would have won if it were not for voter suppression," Raffensperger said. "President Trump then did the flip side and talked about voter fraud, but neither one of them was supported by the facts."
Multiple investigations were opened against the former president following his attempts to pressure elected officials to alter the 2020 election results. In a now-infamous phone call to Raffensperger, Trump asked the Georgia official to "find" 11,780 votes to overturn the election.
"Accept the facts that you have lost and move on. If you want to run again, by all means," Raffensperger said. "But accept the results."