Georgia's Raffensperger: I can't keep Donald Trump off the ballot – Atlanta News First
ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said voters – not prosecutors, politicians or American vice presidents – will decide the 2024 election
“The American people will make their own decisions,” Raffensperger wrote Wednesday in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal. “Country music singer Luke Bryan, a fellow Georgian, said it best: ‘Most people are good.’ Most of the time they will get it right. Trust the voters.
On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported a lawsuit has been filed to bar former President Donald Trump from Colorado’s primary ballot. The lawsuit, citing the 14th Amendment, could eventually make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The complaint was filed on behalf of six Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Liberal groups have demanded that states’ top election officials bar Trump under the clause that prohibits those who “engaged in an insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution from holding higher office.
Raffensperger – who has had several highly publicized disagreements with the nation’s 45th president over the years – wrote, “Some legal scholars are arguing that secretaries of state should remove Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which states that a public official is ineligible for public office if he has ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion against’ America.
“But Georgia law contemplates a legal process that must take place before anyone is removed from the ballot. Anyone who believes in democracy must let the voters decide.”
The 14th Amendment, Raffensperger wrote, “was a product of the Reconstruction era, immediately following the Civil War. It was written to keep former Confederate officials and leaders from regaining power by holding public office, and historians have questioned whether it was meant as a permanent standard.
“Attempts to invoke Section 3 against the candidacies of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn failed. Each of the cases required a decision in the courts. But activists are urging secretaries of state like me to bar Mr. Trump from the ballot unilaterally.
“Invoking the 14th Amendment is merely the newest way of attempting to short-circuit the ballot box,” Raffensperger wrote. “Since 2018, Georgia has seen losing candidates and their lawyers try to sue their way to victory. It doesn’t work. Stacey Abrams’s claims of election mismanagement following the 2018 election were rejected in court, as were Mr. Trump’s after the 2020 election.
“The 2024 election won’t be decided by prosecutors,” Raffensperger concluded. “It won’t be decided by John Eastman. And it won’t be decided by the vice president, whose role is simply to oversee a joint session of Congress in which each state’s electors are counted.”
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