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. //

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. //

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. //

“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.