Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has yet again found himself caught up in right-wing election conspiracy theories as he tries to fend off attempts by fellow Republicans in his state to hand over sensitive voter data to the Trump administration.
And he gave an emphatic response last week to members of his party as they try to get him to comply with the administration: “Hell no.”
Ever since Donald Trump tried — unsuccessfully — to pressure Georgia’s GOP secretary of state to “find” enough votes to flip the state’s results in the 2020 presidential election, Raffensperger has been portrayed as a bulwark against Trump’s overreach. To be clear, he has had a hand in voter suppression tactics in Georgia himself — but Trump’s authoritarian ambitions have seemed to be a bridge too far for Raffensperger, who’s now running for governor.
And that feeling, apparently ,was the impetus behind Raffensperger’s op-ed last week in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in which he rebuked GOP state senators for introducing a resolution that would force him to hand over the information Trump now wants — presumably so his administration can feed it into the national voter database it’s reportedly attempting to build, as conservatives push debunked claims that unauthorized voters cheat Republicans out of electoral wins.
The op-ed came after a report from The New York Times revealed how top Georgia Republicans had derided Trump’s 2020 election claims in secret testimony. Raffensperger wrote:
Rather than focus on pressing issues like affordability, public safety and education, a group of state senators introduced a resolution demanding the Secretary of State’s Office release the Social Security numbers, dates of birth and driver’s license numbers of every registered Georgia voter to the U.S. Department of Justice and to unspecified, unnamed third-party organizations and corporations.
My response is clear and unequivocal: ‘No.’ And if I’m speaking in my contractor voice, ‘Hell no.’
Raffensperger also said Georgia law prohibits him from handing over voters’ birth dates, driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. And he vowed to never give up that information, even as his office has reportedly said it has provided other data at the federal government’s request.
“Whatever they decide, I’m staying the course. I will not release your private information to questionable actors. I will not break the law because a few folks in suits and name badges demand it,” he wrote. Meanwhile, after a federal judge last week rejected the Justice Department’s bid to get voter data from Oregon, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said she had told Trump and his DOJ “to jump in the Gulf of Maine” after rebuking their efforts to obtain such data. The Democrat said in a statement: The case in Oregon showed what we’ve always known: the best way to deal with a bully isn’t to give in, it’s to say, ‘Hell no.’ I was proud to tell President Trump and the DOJ to jump in the Gulf of Maine because I will never compromise when it comes to protecting Mainers. I look forward to a similar result in our own case. To be abundantly clear, anyone raising concerns about handing any data over to this administration is right to do so. The president has hardly hidden his dictatorial election fantasies — including last week, when he said of this year’s midterms: “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
