At a Georgia Senate Ethics Committee hearing last week about the status of Georgia’s voter rolls, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, claimed “Georgia is No. 1 in America with the cleanest [voter] list in the United States for the amount of list maintenance that we do.”
I was present at the hearing to testify about problems I’ve uncovered in Georgia’s voter rolls. The thousands of potentially invalid votes I’ve found cast by Georgians with suspect residency — and Raffensperger’s subsequent disinterest in investigating those votes — gives me plenty of reasons to doubt Sterling’s claim.
“We just got back from the National Association of Secretaries of State Conference, and one thing rings pretty clearly: there are two states that are basically looked at for the best practices in list maintenance, and they are Georgia and Michigan,” Sterling told the committee, without offering evidence to back up his claims. “Georgia is No. 1 in America with the cleanest list in the United States for the amount of list maintenance that we do. It is absolutely 100 percent a fact, you want a fact and that is it.”
Maria Benson, the communications director for the National Association of Secretaries of State, wouldn’t answer what evidence Sterling had for his boast, telling me instead that “While our members discuss and share information about state election administration policies and procedures at our conferences, NASS does not rank the effectiveness of those policies and procedures.”
Raffensperger’s Team
