Brad Raffensperger

Bradford Jay Raffensperger (born May 18, 1955) is an American businessman, civil engineer, and politician serving as the Secretary of State of Georgia since 2019.

A member of the Republican Party, he previously served in the Georgia House of Representatives, representing District 50.

He served on the Post 2 seat of the Johns Creek City Council from 2012 to 2014.

He replaced Dan McCabe on the City Council.

He resigned in November 2014 to run for the special election to represent the 50th district in the Georgia House, and was succeeded by Chris Coughlin.

Raffensperger subsequently won his bid to the Georgia House in 2015, succeeding Lynne Riley.

In the state House, Raffensperger sponsored legislation to bar county officials from personally profiting from tax liens.

Previously, the Fulton County tax commissioner personally collected fees from tax liens and sales of tax liens to private collection companies, allowing him to amass $200,000 over a four-year period.

The legislation ended this self-enrichment practice.

Raffensperger also sponsored a measure to amend the Georgia state constitution to allow the re-creation of a county that previously existed but had later merged with another county; the measure would allow northern Fulton County to split off to form Milton County.

The number of Latinos eligible to vote in Georgia has expanded and turnout percentage has increased since 2016, exceeding countrywide participation rates of that ethnicity said Jerry Gonzalez, GALEO's executive director.

Latinos are 5 percent of Georgia's electorate, with about 377,000 Latinos eligible to vote, and about 250,000 registered.

Raffensperger ran for the Secretary of State of Georgia in the 2018 election.

The Secretary of State in Georgia oversees elections and is chairman of the state election board.

The Secretary of State also oversees business registration and occupational licensing.

In the Republican Party primary, Raffensperger faced former Alpharetta mayor David Belle Isle, state Representative Buzz Brockway, and state representative Josh McKoon.

In the primary, Raffensperger came in first place and Belle Isle came in second place; because no candidate obtained a majority, the race for the Republican nomination went to a primary runoff, which Raffensperger won.

During his campaign, Raffensperger "said he would reduce government bureaucracy, support voter ID laws and push for verifiable paper ballots when Georgia replaces its electronic voting machines."

In the November 6, 2018, general election, Raffensperger finished with the most votes, leading Democrat John Barrow by less than one percent.

He defeated Barrow in a runoff election on December 4, 2018.

In 2019, Raffensperger fought 2018 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, as she contested his action to remove 300,000 names from the voter registration rolls, and he won the case.

In 2021, he removed over 100,000 additional names from the Georgia rolls, depending in part on data received from ERIC, the national Electronic Registration Information Center.

The Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials (GALEO) and other civil rights groups sued Raffensperger's Office and the Gwinnett County elections board in federal court, arguing that the county's mailing of mail-in ballot applications printed only in English should also have been sent in the Spanish language to registered voters in Gwinnett County because of its large Spanish-speaking population.

Raffensperger rose to national prominence in the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, in which incumbent President Donald Trump lost.

Trump refused to accept defeat, made false claims of fraud, and launched an unsuccessful protracted campaign to overturn the election results.

As part of this campaign, Trump made a recorded phone call on January 2, 2021, in which he attempted to persuade Raffensperger to change the election results in Georgia in Trump's favor.

Raffensperger refused to do so, and said the outgoing president's claims were based on falsehoods.

Raffensperger was reelected in the 2022 Georgia Secretary of State election, after defeating Trump-backed Jody Hice in the Republican primary and Democratic challenger Bee Nguyen in the general election.

Raffensperger earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Western Ontario and a Master of Business Administration from Georgia State University.

Raffensperger is the chief executive officer of Tendon Systems, LLC, a contracting and engineering firm that operates in Columbus, Georgia, and Forsyth County, Georgia.

He amassed a net worth of $26.5 million from his work in the private sector.

Raffensperger is a lifelong Republican.

The suit was dismissed in October 2020 by U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II, who ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing and the English-only mailings did not violate the Voting Rights Act.

In 2020, the Georgia presidential primaries, originally set for March 24, were moved to May 19 (the date for non-presidential primaries in Georgia), due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Later, Raffensperger further postponed the Georgia primaries to June 9 due to the coronavirus crisis.

During the 2020 Georgia elections, Raffensperger sought to prevent Georgia polling places from printing paper backups of voter registration and absentee voting information in case polling places would struggle to use voter check-in tablets, called Poll Pads, which had been problematic in Georgia's primary elections in June 2020.

The tablets had caused long lines at polling places.

Voting rights groups had requested paper backups to prevent a risk of chaos on election day in case the tablets failed.

The voting rights groups sued Raffensperger in federal court; they obtained an order from a district judge ordering Georgia election officials to prepare such paper backups, but this order was blocked by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

To protect voting rights during the pandemic, Raffensperger directed the mailing of absentee (mail-in) ballot applications to all of Georgia's 6.9 million active registered voters for the state's June 2020 primary.