Jan 4, 2021

Georgia Secretary of State Office Press Conference Transcript January 4: Trump Call, Senate Runoff Election

Georgia Secretary of State Office Press Conference Transcript January 4: Senate Runoff Election
RevBlogTranscriptsGeorgia Secretary of State Office Press Conference Transcript January 4: Trump Call, Senate Runoff Election

Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling held a press conference on January 4, in light of the Senate runoff election. He addressed Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger’s phone call with President Donald Trump, shooting down Trump’s fraud claims.

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Gabriel Sterling: (00:00)
It’s really good to see you all again, happy new year. We are preparing for a major election tomorrow, obviously. A few things we want to go over and then we will go into some other items, I’m sure.

Gabriel Sterling: (00:11)
So as of right now, we have 962,886 mail-in absentee ballots received. There’s 281,376 that are still outstanding. I’m hoping to get the military received and outstanding before the end of this press conference which will hopefully come in on my cell phone. Early vote in person, obviously we smashed a record for turnout on that one, we’re at 2,074,857. So that means right now we’re looking at 3,037,743 votes that have already been cast across Georgia. Now the previous record for a runoff election was 2004, I think that’s right, Saxby Chambliss race, which was 2.1 million votes that were cast. That is the previous record. And in the election 2018 runoff election, we saw just under 1.5 million. So obviously a lot of interest. I’m sure Georgians are tired of TV ads, text messages, voicemails, and mail. So it’s all going to end very soon, hopefully.

Gabriel Sterling: (01:12)
In preparation for the election tomorrow on election day voting, we have 6,963 poll pads. They finished the final loading of their data today before lunch. We had about 21 counties, those are the last ones to go, most of them completed it over the weekend. There’ll be a total of 2, 648 polling locations open on election day, with a couple of them closed due to some shortages and some other COVID related items, but the total we have right now is 2,648. We don’t anticipate changes, but that always may happen. We have shared those locations with Georgia Power and the EMCs in case there’s power issues or any other issues might come up from that. And we’ve seen a few shortages of poll workers, I think I specifically saw Morgan County they’re going to lose two locations because of that.

Gabriel Sterling: (02:01)
Now, what were you seen also is a difference in the turnout models, depending on congressional district and county in the state so far, in large part driven by the continuing misinformation and disinformation concerning the value of people’s votes in this state. The secretary wants me to make clear that everybody’s vote is going to count. Everybody’s vote did count. I want to make that abundantly clear. If you care about the values and direction of the nation you want to see, it is your obligation to turn out and vote tomorrow, be you Democrat or Republican. However, right now, given the nature of the president’s statements and several other people who have been aligned with him previously, have literally had a rally saying protest and don’t vote. We are specifically asking you and telling you, please turn out and vote tomorrow.

Gabriel Sterling: (02:54)
One of the things specifically I’ve had to argue with people whom I’ve known for 20 years, they say, “Well, we feel like our election was stolen. We feel like our votes don’t count.” And I said, “Okay, I’m not acknowledging that the election was stolen, because it wasn’t. I’m not acknowledging that there was massive voter fraud, because there wasn’t.” But I said, “But if you believe in your heart of hearts that there was, the best thing for you to do is to turn out and vote and make it harder for them to steal. If that’s what you genuinely in your heart of hearts believe, turn out and vote. There are people who fought and died and marched and prayed and voted to get the right to vote. Throwing it away because you have some feeling that it may not matter is self-destructive ultimately and a self fulfilling prophecy in the end.”

Gabriel Sterling: (03:38)
So everybody who cares about the future of this nation should turn out and vote. It’s vitally important. It’s absolutely important. And the reason I’m having to stand here today is because there are people in positions of authority and respect who have said their votes didn’t count, and it’s not true. And I’m going to do it again and I’m going to go through all this anti-disinformation Monday, it’s whack-a-mole again, it is Groundhog day again, I’m going to get to talk about things that I’ve talked about repeatedly for two months, but I’m going to do it again one last time I’m hoping. Because at the end of the day, we want to make sure people understand their votes count. Every person, every voice, matters. And I know that there’s people who have fought for that for years about this.

Gabriel Sterling: (04:20)
So let’s start again. And yes, some of this is going to come out of the continuing statements from the president. And some of his supporters. State Farm. All right, this has been one that’s been conflated over several different things. We have multiple scan ballots, we have Ruby Freeman, we have the leak, that he says a water main break, which wasn’t a water main break. So in order to be fully transparent, one of the things we did is we had a local media organization, WSB, Justin over here, we went through it for hours and hours, walked through frame by frame and showed what happened.

Gabriel Sterling: (04:52)
So let’s start. If you go to securevotega.com, we have posted all the videos from State Farm for that day that cover the relevant periods. 5:23 AM, they walk in and they discover what is essentially a pond on the floor, where you can see water coming out of the sky. So they say, “Okay, we can’t do our work here this morning.” They call in the State Farm people, it’s not Fulton County people, which is one of the other things they said, there’s no Fulton County work order to fix the water leak. And guess what? It wasn’t in a Fulton County facility, it was in State Farm. So they were the ones who fixed the leak. And it was a urinal that was overflowed because they were turned off because, guess what? Nobody’s in State Farm because of COVID, other than this particular usage. So they turned off all those things and it went over the edge of the relief valve and that’s what caused the leak.

Gabriel Sterling: (05:33)
So they come in, then you go to another one about seven in the morning or so where you have essentially the, I don’t know what to call it, the drying Zamboni that’s driving around on the carpet, cleaning it all up. Then at about 8:23 you see a woman bring in the table in question that has been the point of Mr. Giuliani’s 90 second clip. She’s pulling it with one hand and she sets it down. There’s nothing underneath it, okay? Then you can fast forward to later in the day, about 9:45 or or. Everybody there, there are two groups of people there, there’s cutters and there are scanners. What happened was the cutters began putting their stuff away because everybody was under the impression they were going to get home. We have discovered this. So they start putting covers over the cutting machines and everything. So then we see also, while the monitors and the press are still in the room, they bring out the carriers which are normal absentee ballot carriers. And I will admit, when I listened to the audio of the phone call and the president brought that up again and I heard it on radio again today, I wanted to scream… Well, I did scream at the computer and I screamed in my car at the radio talking about this because this has been thoroughly debunked.

Gabriel Sterling: (06:43)
They bring out the normal absentee ballot carriers, there are monitors in the room, there is press in the room, they take the ballots that have been opened, put them in carrier trays and put them in there, put them in the boxes, put the lid on, the lid matches the box, and then you see at one point during the video a woman crawling on the floor putting the numbered seals on them so they can keep the chain of custody. Approximately 10:25, 10:30, the secretary in our office receives word that Fulton County is shutting down for the night at State Farm Arena. So as some of y’all who were there on election night recall, the secretary got a little irritated with this and made his feelings quite known. They said, “Some of us have been working through the night and we’re glad to see that Fulton County sees the need to just go ahead and knock off for the evening.”

Gabriel Sterling: (07:27)
So Chris Harvey, our elections director then calls Rick Barron the election director of Fulton County who was at the other location, which was their English Street warehouse, because he was doing election day activities. Chris calls Rick, Rick says, “We’re not shutting down,” while Chris says, “It looks like you are.” So then you can go back to the videotape and see Ralph Jones, take a phone call approximately almost 11 o’clock and you can see his shoulders kind of shrug. He takes the phone call, he’s being told at that point by his boss, Rick Barron, you need to stay and continue to scan. So he hangs up the phone, he goes over to some boxes, puts some more seals on…it doesn’t box and put some more seals.

Gabriel Sterling: (08:03)
So he hangs up the phone, he goes over to some boxes, puts some more seals on them because obviously if you watch the video tape, many of the people that are there have been there since 7:00 in the morning. It’s already 11:00 at night. They were all under the impression they were going to get to go home. So you see him spend about 30 seconds going, “Heck, what am I going to say to these people?” So then he walks back over to the corner of a desk and says, “I’ve got the word, we got to keep on scanning.” So they go back to the boxes that you see them put under the table at the approximately 10:00 hour. There is videotape of this. And this is what is really frustrating: The president’s legal team had the entire tape, they watched the entire tape, and then, from our point of view, intentionally misled the state senate, voters, and the people of the United States about this.

Gabriel Sterling: (08:45)
It was intentional, it was obvious, and anybody watching this knows that. Anyone watching it knows that. That’s why we released the entire tape for people to watch. So there’s this claim that that was done. So they pull those out and begin to scan. Then the other claim comes about a woman named Ruby Freeman and multiple scanning. One of the things you need to understand is a normal ballot processing, if there was a problem with the ballot what it does is it stops. But before that, four or five will get through. So they say, “Delete that last batch and rescan it so they scan properly.” That is the normal process that is done. Secondarily to that, everybody might be familiar with the fact the president wanted us to do a hand recount, a hand retally, which we ended up doing under our audit. That audit showed that there was no problem from machine scanning.

Gabriel Sterling: (09:33)
If somebody took a stack of ballots and scanned them multiple times, you would have a lot of votes with no corresponding ballots. So let’s go over the numbers one more time. Statewide, for the sheer number of ballots, they were off by 0.153%. For the margin, they were off by 0.0099%, which shows that the machine scanned properly, our counties did a great job of following these batches and doing the hand count properly, appropriately, with scrutiny and with observers. So let’s put that to bed right now. And one of the other things we did as part of our transparency is we have put all of those tally sheets online for every county so you can go through and look at them all. And it’s, again, the securevotega.com. Let’s see. Let’s go over the numbers that the president’s team is claiming. We have a little chart over here.

Gabriel Sterling: (10:24)
They’re claiming that were 2,056 felons that voted. Our research, and we have better data because we are directly tied to the state government on this, Department of Corrections, and the other department which I can’t remember what it’s called right now. Basically it tracks when people are on probation. There we go. We know exactly how many people voted for this, but as we have an outward bound of 74 potential people who are felons voted. What that means is that’s the biggest number it could be. We will investigate and find out. Some of these people completed their sentences. Some of these people have the same name and birth date, so there’ll be crossover there. So 74 is the outward bound. It’s going to be lower than that. So let’s be clear about that. Then there is the claim that 66,248 people below the age of 18 voted. The actual number is zero.

Gabriel Sterling: (11:12)
Let me be clear. 66,000 versus zero. And the reason we know that is because the dates are on the voter registration. There are four cases, four where people request to their absentee ballot before they turned 18 but they turned 18 by the Election Day. That means that is a legally cast ballot. So again, 66,000, which is the biggest single number they have on these kinds of votes, versus zero. They say that there’s 2,423 people who voted without being registered. Let’s just be clear about this. You can’t do it. There cannot be a ballot issue to you. There’s no way to tie it back to you. There’s no way for them to have a name to correspond back to unless they are registered voters. So that number is zero. Then we’ve got 1,043 illegally voted using a PO box. Again, we’re going through the investigation on this, so far everyone we’ve seen has been when there is mailboxes, et cetera, something like that in a multi-family building like an apartment.

Gabriel Sterling: (12:10)
So you’ll have what looks like PO boxes listed in the system, but they’re actually the residential address of record for people who live in multi-family housing, like apartments. So that’s everything we’ve seen so far. We haven’t seen anybody actually registering to vote at a USPS PO box. The next one is 4,926 voted past the legal registration deadline. Again, it’s zero. We have zero record of anybody doing that because the voter registration cutoff is a voter registration cutoff, so there’s no corresponding way to do that. They couldn’t be issued a ballot, because they are not legally within the system of that to have ballots issued. 10,315 who died before the election. Again, our information from the Department of Vital Records we go through county by county shows potentially two. So far two. It could change, it could go, but it’s not 10,000. 395 cast ballots in two states. We’re investigating that, but again… And we’ve got double voters, which we are investigating. But again, we’re talking handfuls, not tens of thousands. Let’s remember, and I think we’re all very clear on the number now, that it was 11,779. We’ve seen nothing in our investigations of any of these data claims that shows there’s nearly enough ballots to change the outcome. And the secretary and I at this podium has said since November 3rd, there is illegal voting in every single election in the history of mankind because there are human beings involved in the process. It’s going to happen. It’s a question of limiting it and putting as many safeguards as you can in place to make sure it doesn’t happen. All right. Oh yeah, we had part of the hand tally be discussed in relation to the potential double scanning. Let’s just go to the other ridiculous claims that Dominion voting machines are somehow using fractional voting or flipping votes. Again, by doing the hand tally, it shows none of that is true. Not a wit.

Gabriel Sterling: (14:07)
And let’s go back to the overall claims about Dominion Voting Systems in general. If you look in Wisconsin, they’re claiming Wisconsin was stolen through Dominion voting machines. In the 14 counties in which Dominion voting machines were used in Wisconsin, the president got 59% of the vote. And the counties in Pennsylvania where Dominion voting machines were used, he got 52.5% of the vote. He made a claim at one point that over 900,000 votes were deleted by Dominion machines, and the 14 counties where that happened, they had 1.3 million people vote. That was 70% some odd percent plus, a 76% turnout. In order for 900,000 to have been deleted, they would’ve had to have a 130% turnout. That did not happen because it cannot happen. Again, this is all easily, provably false yet the president persists. And by doing so, undermines Georgian’s faith in the election system, especially Republican Georgians in this case, which is important because we have a big election coming up tomorrow and everybody deserves to have their vote counted if they want it to be, Republican and Democrat alike.

Gabriel Sterling: (15:17)
Now let’s move on to signature matching. There were claims about signature matching not being done, and they were based on feelings, we believe. No specific evidence with ever brought up until in one of the Trump filings there was a specific allegation that signature verification was not being done on the absentee ballot request form properly in Cobb County during the June primary. So that’s the first time we had a specific, actionable claim a signature match not being done. So with that in mind, the governor graciously offered after secretary and he discussed potentially using GBI resources. So we got GBI to come alongside the secretary of state investigators. Multiple teams. Vic Reynolds stood here last week to announce the outcome of that. And…

Gabriel Sterling: (16:03)
… multiple teams. Nick Reynolds stood here last week to announce the outcome of that, and of the 15,118 absentee ballot envelopes that they investigated, they found two with potential problems. Two. 99.99% was properly done. And of those two, the actual voter who was intended to be marked as voting was the actual voter. They could have been done through a cure period, which would have been a better way to do that. Another thing they want to talk about is the vast difference in rejection rates. Well, what we’ve seen is there was not a vast difference in rejection rates. What’s happening is in order to confuse people because they don’t understand election systems is they’re conflating the entirety of absentee ballots that were rejected versus those that were rejected for signature mismatch or missing a signature.

Gabriel Sterling: (16:46)
Now, we’re also comparing apples to oranges. In ’16, I’ve done this so long I don’t want to screw up these numbers, but I’m going to give the general, don’t hold me to this exact number, I think it was 0.26%. in ’18, it was 0.16%, and in 2020 so far, it’s 0.15%. We’ve got some updated numbers on this now. And the differences is, in 2019, HB316 was passed, which allowed there to be curing of balance. So there are teams of Republicans and Democrat, young people, running around the state as we speak finding people who have signature issues to cure their ballots. That’s going on right now. And the Democrats did a much better job of that during the general election. The Republicans were not prepared. The Democrats had their own forms set up. They had teams set up. They were ready to go. It was a late entry on the Republican side to do some of those.

Gabriel Sterling: (17:33)
And about 5,000 total ballots were rejected for some purpose and about 2,600 of those were cured. So that means the final rejection was around 2,400 ballots around the total of five million, or a percentage of the 1.3 million that we saw that were voted absentee. Let’s go into some of the more new things. There is no shredding of ballots going on. That’s not real. It’s not happening. There’s shredding of envelopes that were the non-used ones, or there’s also shredding of the secrecy envelopes that came through. We saw some of those in the Senate here, and it’s obvious that they are the secrecy envelopes, which have no evidentiary value because there was no signature on it, there’s no way to match it back. They’re just basically trash. The law requires you keep the signature and oath envelopes and the ballots themselves for 22 months. Those are all being kept.

Gabriel Sterling: (18:25)
Let’s see. This is what I don’t fully understand. No one is changing parts or pieces out of Dominion voting machines. I don’t even know what that means. It’s not a real thing. That is not happening. The President mentioned on the call from two days ago. That’s, again, not real. I don’t even know how exactly to explain that. Let’s see Secretary Raffensperger does not have a brother named Ron Raffensperger. That is also not real. The President tweeted that out as well. Let’s see. That is such a long list. Oh yes. The other really fantastical thing we saw the other day was a potential hacking of Dominion equipment during a Senate hearing last week. That did not happen either. Let’s go over a couple of reasons why. First of all, ballot marking devices and scanners, neither one have modems. It’s very hard to hack things without modems. There’s nothing to talk to. So let’s get that clear.

Gabriel Sterling: (19:25)
The poll pads, which is a no ink device, does have the ability to connect to WiFi, which we use it for loading purposes and in case there’s an issue on Election Day, but they’re not hooked up live all the time. And if they saw anything, they could see traffic back and forth, but it would basically be like watching a river go by, you couldn’t get in. It’s essentially if they did this, which we have no proof of. We have claim after claim after claim with zero proof. Zero. And signed affidavits are part of an evidentiary trail, but they have to be investigated. And let’s remember, everybody who came and gave testimony was public comment at the State Senate Hearing. This office was never asked to come and discuss those items with that State Senate Subcommittee. That didn’t happen either, which I find interesting, because obviously they’re making wild claims that, again, undermine people’s faith in the system.

Gabriel Sterling: (20:20)
Let’s see. Oh yeah, this is another one that came over the weekend from the founder of overstock.com that they had found thousands and thousands of fake ballots in Fulton County Warehouse. For any of you all in the press who have been to the Fulton County Warehouse, these are the emergency ballots that have been sitting in that warehouse since before the November election, very much in plain view, everybody to save. And what happened, the reason they had a high number, first of all, every County has to have those emergency ballots by my rule. The State Election Board rule says you have to have 10% of the available ones for each polling location and they have to be printed for that polling location for the ballot styles so they can track it properly. In Fulton County’s case, y’all may remember that there was a COVID outbreak in their warehouse not long before the logic and accuracy testing period was happening for the general election.

Gabriel Sterling: (21:09)
In a very wild abundance of caution, they had what they referred to as not Plan A, not Plan B, what they referred to as Plan C, which was, “If we can’t get people in to do the logic and accuracy testing on all of our equipment, we’re going to print up 100% of our ballots we need to let hand marker ballots people be what have to do if we cannot get the machines done.” They did that out of an abundance of caution given the unknowable unknowns surrounding COVID and their ability to get employees in to do that. They were thankfully able to get the employees in. Dominion staff came in to help them make sure they got a logic and accuracy test done so they were able to deploy all of their BMDs and their BMD carriers and scanners so they didn’t have to use those ballots. But that’s why those ballots existed. They are not fake ballots. They are real ballots. They are unused balance.

Gabriel Sterling: (21:52)
And what I find really interesting about this is they were in shrink wrapped items in boxes that are sealed. What can you do with those? They’re sitting right there. Everybody saw them. Let’s see, trying to think what other? Here’s part of the problem, y’all. I sit down and try to write down every thing that we see that comes over the internet as a potential thing of disinformation. It gets exploded. We all look at these things. We know there’s lots of bots that are doing it. We have foreign powers that are pushing some of these things at the same time. So here’s the takeaway from all this. This office has been open and transparent. We are continuing investigations. There are questions about pristine ballots. That was one last thing, the pristine ballot thing. There are three reasons you can have the “pristine ballot”, which is essentially the absentee/emergency/provisional ballot.

Gabriel Sterling: (22:47)
There’s first one, military and overseas voters oftentimes will get what they call an electronic ballot. What happens is, once we get the ballot built, starting the 49th to the 45th day, we will send emails out to those people who want to have electronic ballot delivery, which is many of our military service men and women. So they take that, they print it, and they bubble in their choices. Now, obviously, that’s on an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper or 11 by 14 where they can print it on, so it’s not sized properly to go through a scanner. So when that comes back to the County, they will duplicate that on a flat unfolded piece of paper on the absentee ballot/emergency ballot. That’s a normal process for many of the military and overseas voters that are electronically delivered. The other situation you might see that in is an emergency ballot situation. If a ballot marking device goes down or wasn’t used, which is the case we saw in the morning in Spalding County on Election Day, that will use the emergency ballots as backup and those will just be scanned directly in the machine and not folded. And the final place you would see that is on a damaged or adjudicated ballot that was not adjudicated through the electronic system, or in Fulton’s case, what you saw was they were putting so many of the absentee ballots through their cutters that occasionally it would catch the ballot itself and slice it.

Gabriel Sterling: (24:03)
… ballots through their cutters that occasionally would catch the ballot and self and slice it. In Fulton County’s case, they did the vast majority, I think a hundred percent of their duplication on a BMD. In Cobb County’s location, I think they did all those on hand marked paper ballots. So there’s a difference of use in processes within each one of the counties. So that’s why you would see quote, unquote, pristine ballots. Wednesday. We’ve all heard the reports that there’s going to be several senators and congressmen who will be objecting to the electors being seated. We anticipate that each time they do that, they’re going to go, they’ll separate out. They’ll have their debate for two hours. The state of Georgia’s electors will get seated. They will look at this evidence as best they can in such a way, and it will be voted on by the House and Senate.

Gabriel Sterling: (24:48)
And we anticipate that, and that will prove our certification was proper, by the end of the day. And that we followed the process properly. And I give you back to Senator Tom Cotton’s statement from earlier today that says, “This is the process that we follow, this the appropriate step under the constitution of the laws of the state of Georgia and the laws of the United States. So, with that, I want to say, if you’re a Georgia voter, if you want your values reflected by your elected officials, I strongly beg and encourage you, go vote tomorrow. Do not let anybody discourage you, do not self-suppress your own vote. Do not make a self-fulfilling prophecy out of doing this. Don’t let anybody steal your vote that way. And that’s what’s happening. If you self-suppress, you’re taking away your important voice from this election. So with that, I’ll go ahead and take any questions y’all got. Oh, sorry. [inaudible 00:25:48] his microphone back there, Justin.

Justin: (25:48)
Hey. Yeah. Is the secretary of state or the state election board considering asking either the Fulton DA or the Georgia attorney general to investigate the call with the president over the weekend?

Gabriel Sterling: (26:00)
I do not know that.

Justin: (26:03)
Any discussions of that?

Gabriel Sterling: (26:04)
Not that I’m aware of.

Speaker 1: (26:09)
From all that you said there, I mean, do you believe as some have said that what happened in that phone call was an attack-

Gabriel Sterling: (26:14)
I’m having a really hard time hearing you, I apologize.

Speaker 1: (26:16)
I’ll come down there. Do you believe as some have said that this is an attack on democracy?

Gabriel Sterling: (26:20)
There we go. We can hear that.

Speaker 1: (26:23)
I’ll start again.

Gabriel Sterling: (26:23)
Yes.

Speaker 1: (26:24)
As some have said, do you believe that what happened in that phone call was an attack on democracy?

Gabriel Sterling: (26:30)
I’ll leave other people to make the decision on that. I personally found it to be something that was not normal out of place, and nobody I know who would be president would do something like that to a secretary of state.

Speaker 1: (26:42)
Thank you.

Gabriel Sterling: (26:47)
Yes, Mark.

Mark: (26:47)
Afternoon. Looking forward to tomorrow. Have you heard about any threats or security problems or anything that could interfere with people voting? And also, what do you expect turnout to be like tomorrow?

Gabriel Sterling: (26:59)
Well, I anticipate there will be a high turnout, and there’s a large bucket of voters in many, many congressional districts that could potentially show up. We anticipate there could be any number of potential threats out there that could be attempting to encourage or discourage turnout. We encourage everybody to please turn out and be safe, be smart, and don’t let anybody get in the way of you casting your vote.

Mark: (27:27)
And have you heard about any threats? Will there be extra security?

Gabriel Sterling: (27:31)
We’ve discussed with GBI, FBI and Sheriff’s departments potentially there being threats. And we’ve seen some of that nature potentially out there. They’re under investigation. Yes. ma’am.

Blayne A.: (27:39)
Hi, Gabe, Blayne Alexander with NBC news. Following up very quickly on Justin’s question, to members of the board of elections, the state board of elections have called on the secretary of state’s office to investigate that phone call. How is the secretary’s office responding? Is there any plan to investigate, or will you block that investigation in any way?

Gabriel Sterling: (27:56)
I’m not aware of any discussion specifically on that yet, but I’m sure it will be taken under advisement.

Blayne A.: (28:00)
And I’ll ask you very quickly about the secretary’s desire to have that phone call recorded. Why did he want that call recorded? Was he concerned about anything improper being said or that he may need to release it later?

Gabriel Sterling: (28:10)
I think given the environment we’re in right now and political situation that we’re in and the history of the president, knowing that he sometimes doesn’t necessarily characterize things as they might’ve actually occurred, it was out of an abundance of caution, but I’m sure many people, I’m sure the president’s side recorded it too. So they might’ve been the ones that leaked part of that as well.

Blayne A.: (28:29)
Thank you.

Matt Finn: (28:31)
Matt Finn with Fox News National. How do you interpret the president asking the secretary of state to quote, find votes on that phone call? Is it fair to say the president was asking the secretary of state to fraudulently find or flip votes?

Gabriel Sterling: (28:44)
I don’t know if he was trying to fraudulently find the votes, but the thing is, we have certified this election, so there are no more votes to find. We will continue investigations as he has an election challenge. And one of their things that they were discussing on that phone call was they have sued the state of Georgia and the secretary of state. There are rules of evidence to follow once you do that, trying to go outside of that is an issue. And we’ve said, I believe our lawyers sent their lawyers a letter saying, “If you want you to dismiss your challenge, we’re more than happy to share this data with you to show that your data is incorrect and you have in fact lost the state of Georgia.”

Matt Finn: (29:14)
The Bureau of Investigations says there’s an unprecedented number of threats statewide. Are you aware of any of those types of threats?

Gabriel Sterling: (29:22)
I’m sorry, the unprecedented number of threats what?

Matt Finn: (29:23)
The Bureau of Investigation says that there’s an unprecedented number of threats that have come in statewide regarding the election. We’re not sure the nature of those threats. Are you aware of what type of threats you guys-

Gabriel Sterling: (29:32)
We’re aware of some, but we’re trying to not discuss in too much detail about that while they try to investigate and find out what the actual nature of those threats may be.

Konstantin T.: (29:44)
Hey, Gabe, Konstantin Toropin with CNN. So this is now the second sort of conversation that has been reported out on this topic. First, it was Lindsey Graham earlier in November. Now the president. Has the secretary of state’s office been contacted by any other members of the Trump administration or GOP officials?

Gabriel Sterling: (30:08)
Well, I mean, our office is contacted by Democrats, Republicans alike pretty consistently to discuss election issues. So yes, that has occurred. Specifically, it’s a little bit of a broad question, I think, but we get contacted by members of the administration. We get contacted by Democrats. We get contacted by Republicans.

Konstantin T.: (30:25)
Have you been contacted on the topic of some of these conspiracy theories that you’ve outlined today?

Gabriel Sterling: (30:31)
I mean, no more than my normal of having to explain the ridiculousness of a big piece of this information. So thank you all very much.

Greg Palast: (30:40)
Excuse me. The secretary of state was asked by a federal judge to meet with Black Voters Matter to return wrongly purged voters back to the voter rolls. Why have you refused to meet with the Black Voters Matter before this vote? This is the second time you’ve ducked this question, and this the third time you’ve ducked Black Voters Matter. Okay, Greg Palast, Pacific…

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