Every now and then a Carter Center Republican will ask me why I have such a problem with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Gabe Sterling, and their henchmen.
So, here are just the major highlights. This is a bit on the long side, but also detailed, and from now on this is probably what I will be giving people instead of explaining it all over and over again.
But even seasoned election integrity activists may take important facts out of this article, so I invite you all to spend some time going through it, and the links it contains. As you read, you might also want to keep in mind that I gave most of this information to the Feds.
Gabe’s Challenge
Our story begins with a citizen voter challenge filed by Fulton County resident Gabriel “Gabe” Sterling, who is the former Chief Operating Officer for the Georgia Secretary of State, and is currently a candidate for the office himself.
On December 22, 2020 Fox 5 Atlanta published a story titled “Woman voted in presidential race, requested absentee ballot using Georgia election official’s address.”
It detailed the events surrounding a vote cast by a woman who previously lived in the home now owned by Gabe Sterling. He had filed an election challenge against the woman alleging that she cast a ballot by absentee in the 2020 General Election while still claiming residency at his address.
When an unqualified voter deliberately lies about where they live in order to obtain and then cast a ballot with a federal race on it, that is a violation of multiple state and federal laws, including OCGA 21-2-562, 21-2-571, and 52 USC 10307 which is the “Prohibited Acts” section of The Voting Rights Act.
With probable cause to believe an unlawful vote was cast, Gabe was obviously right to challenge that voter, even in a county like Fulton where they frequently reject even the most reasonable, lawful, and common sense citizen voter challenges.
You will want to remember all this, and his challenge, for later…
Background…
I’ve known Gabe since he was about 15 years old. He went to school with my youngest brother and supported our father, Guy Davis, when dad became the Republican Nominee for Governor back in 1986. I remember occasionally seeing him when he visited our home for parties or events.
After that campaign, I began building enhanced voter databases for candidates and organizations. And when I started seeing residency and districting problems in that data, I also began talking with the candidates I was working with about how to fix them. That was really my first experience with what we now call the election integrity movement.
Then in 2002, after I raised those issues before the State Election Board, the Georgia Republican Party asked me to serve as an analyst and expert witness in a disputed election up in House District 1, where those issues had caused utter chaos.
We won that case, the election was set aside and ordered to be held again, and I have been continuing to serve in election cases ever since. Those battles are a lot of hard work and long hours, but for me it is sometimes easier to prove election integrity issues in a courtroom than it is to prove them in the court of public opinion.
But continuing on with our story, Gabe became a political consultant from 2005 – 2012 at Landmark Communications which is owned by my friend Mark Rountree. I’ve known Mark since 1986 too – back then he was the Chairman of the College Republicans at the University of Georgia and was also one of dad’s supporters.
Fast forward a few years and Mark was Brad Raffensperger’s political consultant when he was running for Georgia Secretary of State in 2018.
During that time, Mark asked me to coach Brad on election integrity issues, with particular emphasis on the 1993 National Voter Registration Act and the many issues he and I had been seeing in Georgia’s voter roll data for decades. I did so to the best of my ability.
The night Raffensperger won I was thrilled. I genuinely believed we had elected a Secretary of State who would be a true fighter for election integrity.
Afterwards I went and met with him during his transition to discuss those issues once again, and I still believed he took them seriously. In that meeting he made an overture about hiring me, but I had to decline because I have a business to run, so instead I offered to consult as needed.
Cracks Appeared
In the summer of 2020, I was asked to get involved in a disputed primary election down in Long County Georgia, where double voting had occurred.
What I didn’t realize at the time though – is that it was Brad Raffensperger’s response to the Covid pandemic that had caused it.
I was still on good terms at that time with the Secretary of State’s office, so I gave them the “head’s up” before the news blindsided them. During a call with Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs, she surprised me by inviting me to come in as a contractor after the case ended and do a statewide investigation for them into double voting.
I desperately wanted to do it. That is how concerned I was about it.
Unfortunately the NDA she asked me to sign for access to the data needed to do that investigation, which was arguably a public record, read more like a “catch & kill.”
So, I refused to sign it, and another analyst did the work. As I have been saying ever since, I have reason to believe that it probably wasn’t done properly – and to this day no one really knows how many double voters Georgia actually had in 2020.
They are also a violation of federal law when there is a federal race on the ballot – in fact one of the same I cited earlier: 52 USC 10307 (d).
The Aftermath of 2020
Dissatisfied with Raffensperger’s handling of the 2020 election, Mark Rountree cut ties with him soon after. I was still annoyed about the double voting investigation but was also trying to at least maintain a decent working relationship with them. I’ve maintained one with every Secretary of State’s office, Democrat or Republican, for decades now.
Then not long after Election Day, I began working on an analysis of the voter rolls – not for anyone in particular – but to satisfy my own curiosity. I had decided to run the same kinds of queries I normally do in the cases I’ve worked in, but this time on a statewide basis.
So, after I completed my data processing, I ran one final SQL query and then sat back and waited for “The Beast” to chew through over 7.6 million records.
About a minute later, I suddenly found myself staring at what I knew to be evidence of “systemic irregularities” in that election – data suggesting we’d had tens of thousands of residency violations as well as felony violations of other state and federal election laws.
I don’t think I will ever forget the weight I felt as I sat there staring at my computer monitor, with my heart racing and my mouth hanging open, just trying to get my head around the implications of what I was looking at.
I was well aware that raising those issues could put me and my family right in the eye of the hurricane that had become the 2020 election, but I also felt an enormous sense of duty to keep moving forward.
The Fork in the Road
When I finally calmed down, I knew I needed to do two things almost simultaneously. First, I needed to get that data to President Trump’s attorneys, which I was able to do fairly quickly with a little networking help.
Second, I needed to do something about the upcoming 2021 US Senate runoff, or those violations were just going to occur all over again.
I could literally write a book about the events that unfolded down each of those paths, and maybe one day I will, but for now I’ll summarize what came next.
One path led to that evidence being included in President Trump’s Georgia lawsuit, and to an argument between him and Brad Raffensperger in that now infamous January 2021 phone call.
The other led to a process server at my door on Christmas Eve who brought me a present – three full years of high stakes lawfare in federal court with Stacey Abrams and her attorneys, led by the the arms dealer of Democrat lawfare himself, Marc Elias.
Then in 2022 the Biden DOJ also joined as a party to the case.
It was all a horrible ordeal, but spoiler alert:
“That Damned Phone Call”
On January 2, 2021 I didn’t even know that Trump-Raffensperger phone call was happening. No one told me. All I knew was that I had gotten an email that day from one of the attorneys asking me to send him yet another copy of the data I had given them at the end of November. He didn’t say why, but it only took me a couple minutes to send it again, so I just did as he asked.
Later, when the news broke, and I finally heard the recording and read the transcript, it didn’t take me long to spot the argument over my own analysis. It began when Kurt Hilbert started talking. I’d had contact with him, Ray Smith, and Patrick Witt here on the local level, and Cleta Mitchell on the national level.
If you read that part, you will see that the auditor they had me work with in New York threw out a conservative estimate of 24,149 unlawful votes, but the real number in need of investigation was approximately 35,000.
It was patently obvious to me that President Trump was speaking his usual shorthand on what he thought was a semi-private phone call. When he said “find me 11,780 votes” he was not asking Raffensperger to manufacture unlawful votes. He was asking him to investigate the tens of thousands of votes that I and other analysts had already given him long before that day.
On that call I heard Raffensperger dodging the same exact issues I had personally taught him about more than two years prior – long before he even held the Secretary of State’s office.
