Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was in Savannah on Monday, July 22 to demonstrate how his office is checking, and double-checking, the integrity of voting machines to be used in the Nov. 5 general election. Raffensperger is Georgia’s 29th Secretary of State, elected to the position in 2018 and re-elected in 2022. His office’s website states that the Secretary of State’s top job is to ensure security and accessibility for all elections, and Raffensperger today echoed that sentiment while in Chatham County.

“The reason we are here today, and at all of our 159 counties in Georgia, is to do a health check,” said Raffensperger on Monday at the Chatham County Elections Office. “In other words, we are checking physical security, cybersecurity, but then also now we are checking the diagnostics of the equipment, making sure that the machines are recording votes exactly as the ballot shows.”

Raffensperger’s staff members and Chatham County Elections officials were present as the Secretary spoke for 10 minutes to local media before taking questions for another 10 minutes. Later, a State of Georgia Election official conducted a test ballot, running it through the voting machine as Raffensperger explained the test was looking for a match on the screen and on the submitted ballot. The test was one of many to be conducted during the visit. Raffensperger said Georgia voters can have confidence in the system come November.

“We want to make sure our voters have that confidence when they go to the polls or cast their ballots another way. No matter how you vote in Georgia now—absentee, early voting, or on Election Day—it is based on photo ID,” he said. “We think this has elevated security and provided an appropriate guardrail.”

“In Georgia, we have three choices for people to choose how they want to vote: No-excuse absentee voting, early in-person voting, and on Election Day in person.”

State election data shows the last presidential election in 2020 between Democrat Joe Biden (49.51% of the vote in Georgia) and Republican Donald Trump (49.25%) was as tightly contested as any in the state’s modern history. In total, 4,998,482 Georgians voted in the 2020 general election. Raffensperger expects similar, potentially bigger, numbers in November.

“We don’t make any predictions [about voter turnout], but what I do when I stop by all these counties, I say that I expect it to be as big as 2020 if not bigger. I would say we’ll have over five million people turn out this year.”

Earlier this month, Raffensperger’s office announced in a release a new initiative that aims to weed out non-citizens already registered to vote. The Georgia Department of Driver Services (DDS) identifies for the state potential “people who may be non-citizens according to documents they have previously provided to DDS.”

“Georgia then utilizes SAVE, or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, a program offered through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to verify the citizenship status of people who have been identified as potential non-citizens,” according to the July 11 release.

“No matter what side of the aisle you happen to be on, we are going to have safe, fair, accurate elections here in Georgia,” Raffensperger said Monday. “We do a 100 percent citizen verification, so if any Georgia asks me ‘are there any non-citizens voting?’ I can tell them, ‘no there aren’t.’ We are conducting our second audit of that voter list now, so I can report back to the people of Georgia that only American citizens are voting in our elections here in Georgia.”

Georgia’s early voting period is 17 days long, one of the widest windows in the country. It is set for Oct. 15–Nov. 1. The deadline to register to vote in the general election is Oct. 7.

This article appears in Connect Savannah I July 2024.