Trump Asks Georgia Secretary Of State To Find Him Exactly 11,780 Votes, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Number Of Votes Cast Was Being Determined By Voters

The Filing

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump spent roughly an hour on the telephone Saturday urging Georgia's chief elections officer to locate 11,780 additional votes in his favor, resolving a long-standing concern that the outcome of an American presidential election was still being determined by the number of ballots that voters had actually cast.

The call, placed to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and several state attorneys, addressed a stubborn arithmetic problem that had persisted since November. Trump had lost Georgia to Joseph R. Biden by 11,779 votes, a margin the state had by then counted three separate times, including a full hand recount, and that election officials of both parties had certified as accurate. The President proposed resolving the discrepancy not by recounting the ballots a fourth time but by identifying, somewhere within the state of Georgia, 11,780 votes that had not previously existed.

"I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state," the President explained, articulating a vote-tabulation methodology in which the desired total is established first and the supporting ballots are sourced afterward. Over the course of the call he presented a series of fraud claims, each of which Raffensperger's office had already investigated and rebutted, and suggested that the Secretary of State faced unspecified consequences for declining to produce the figure.

The call formed one component of a broader two-month initiative, marketed under the name "Stop the Steal," in which the President and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits contesting the result across multiple states. The effort had compiled a near-perfect record of failure in the nation's courts, a track record that sources within the administration characterized as proof the courts themselves were compromised. Those sources noted that the legal strategy had nonetheless succeeded in its actual objective, which was to persuade tens of millions of Americans that the election had been stolen regardless of what any court found.

Raffensperger, a Republican who had voted for Trump, declined to find the votes, citing their nonexistence. A recording of the call was released the following day, two weeks after the Electoral College had formally cast its ballots for Biden and four days before Congress was scheduled to certify the result.

At press time, the President had directed supporters to assemble in Washington on January 6 for a rally he promised would be "wild," confident that a sufficiently large crowd might accomplish what 60 courts and one Georgia phone call had not.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who converted a decisive electoral defeat into a durable grievance, a fundraising engine, and a continuing claim on the loyalty of his supporters.
§The Trump 2020 campaign and the Republican National Committee, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars from donors solicited to fund an election challenge with no viable legal path.
§Republican election attorneys and litigators, retained to file and argue more than 60 lawsuits regardless of their prospects.
§The "Stop the Steal" movement and the organizers of the January 6 rally, handed a unifying narrative and a presidential endorsement of the claim that the election had been stolen.
§Vladimir Putin and foreign adversaries, who gained, at no cost, an American president publicly insisting his own country's elections were fraudulent.
§Future candidates, shown that a losing campaign can decline to concede, pressure state officials directly, and retain a national following by doing so.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment