False Statements to Congress in Raffensperger’s January 6, 2021 Congressional Letter (GA)

On January 6, 2021, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger transmitted a ten-page letter to the U.S. Congress, including then-Vice President Pence, in which he stated that the results reported by Georgia’s voting systems “were accurate” and that “there is nowhere close to sufficient evidence to put in doubt the results of the presidential contest in Georgia.” A subsequent analysis by VoterGA identified 42 false or misleading statements within the letter. Most critically: (a) the letter made no reference to the Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee’s finding — transmitted to Secretary Raffensperger and the executive branch on December 17, 2020 — that “the 2020 Georgia General Election was so compromised by systemic irregularities and voter fraud that it should not be certified”; when Senator Ligon was later asked what Raffensperger did with the Subcommittee’s evidence, he stated: “the Secretary did nothing”;(b) the letter omitted the existence of over 250 open election investigations which Raffensperger’s own office had publicly acknowledged just fifteen days earlier, in a December 22, 2020 press release stating that the Secretary “has already launched over 250 investigations into credible elections concerns”; and (c) the letter asserted that Pro V&V had “conducted an audit of a random sample of Dominion Voting Systems voting machines throughout the state using forensic techniques,” when Open Records Request responses from five of the six counties named in the letter confirmed that no Pro V&V audit had taken place in their counties, and no county received a copy of the Pro V&V Field Report or results. Senior U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg, in Curling v. Raffensperger, No. 1:17-cv-02989 (N.D. Ga. 2019), had previously found that the Secretary’s office was “not credible” and had “previously minimized, erased, or dodged the issues underlying this case.”