Georgia election officials defend voting system against barrage of false claims, conspiracy theories
More than 70 million people have already voted in the 2024 election, and Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State's office, knows what he'll say to people who will inevitably challenge the results.
"I'm sorry that your candidate lost. But the rules are the rules. The law is the law. And the count is the count," Sterling said.
As of Friday, more than half of registered voters in Georgia had already voted, according to data from Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office.
Sterling and Raffensperger were among the Republicans pushing back against claims of fraud in 2020, when Georgia — where President Biden won — was at the center of a scheme to overthrow the election results. In a state where Republicans controlled every branch of government, Raffensperger stood up to former President Donald Trump and stood by the state's results.
"I work for the people of Georgia. I respond and I work for the voters of Georgia," Raffensperger told 60 Minutes in an interview. "My job is to run a fair, honest, accurate election."
Election lie chaos
That fairness and honesty was met with threats of violence toward election workers. Sterling, in a news conference after the 2020 election, urged Trump and lawmakers to condemn the threats. "Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone's going to get hurt. Someone's going to get shot. Someone's going to get killed," Sterling said.
But election chaos continued, with some election deniers storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Sterling hoped his message would get through to everyone, but it hasn't.
"There's some you're never going to convince and you just have to accept that you're never going to convince them," Sterling said. "But for the vast majority of Americans who have questions, basically they think, 'Well, if there's this much smoke, there must be something. Nobody would lie this much about it.' So I think there's savable souls there, who basically, they want to understand."
Does fraud happen?
There is some election fraud, but it's rare, CBS News election consultant David Becker said. Few people know elections like Becker, who helped enforce voting rights at the Justice Department and who led the creation of a data center now used by half of the states in the U.S. that help keep voter records up to date.
"We're talking about dozens of votes in a big national election. It is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to steal a big national election. We are so decentralized with almost 10,000 different jurisdictions run by Democratic and Republican election officials," Becker said. "Our voter lists are as accurate as they ever have been before, and they're checked regularly."
In Georgia, Trump's lawyers brought shocking tales of fraud to the legislature, but investigations by state police, the FBI and Raffensperger's office found the allegations were false.
"They said there were 66,000 underage voters. There were zero," Raffensperger said. "Then they said that there were 2,423 non-registered voters. There were zero."
What drives election fraud conspiracy theories
There's always been some amount of skepticism about election results, but it reached new heights in 2020, when Trump ran against President Biden, Sterling said.
In the 2020 election, Trump lost Georgia by just 11,779 votes. Two recounts confirmed his loss. Despite that, Trump said things were "so bad in Georgia."
"Nobody wants to see the kind of fraud that this election has come to represent," Trump said on Nov. 26, 2020.
According to Becker, claims of stolen elections are driven by one factor: whether your candidate won.
"Sadly, tens of millions of Americans have been targeted for this disinformation. They've been preyed upon by losing candidates and foreign adversaries," Becker said. "And importantly, they have donated money. Because a lot of this is financial. There's a financial incentive for those who've spread the lies, who have raised, let's face it, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, off the lie that our elections aren't to be trusted."
Voters remain skeptical today, just days away from the 2024 election.
"We have to tell them over and over again, 'Voter suppression's fake. Voter fraud is fake. It's used to raise money and get you angry,'" Sterling said.
Debunking election fraud conspiracy theories
With false and misleading information circulating ahead of Election Day, Becker took on some of the conspiracy theories around election fraud in the United States.
Conspiracy theory: Bogus votes are electronically inserted into a tabulation machine -
"They're not connected to the internet. They are under strict physical chain of custody. It is really hard to get access to a physical machine and do anything to it. And even if there were some attempt to hack the machine or, probably more likely, have some kind of malfunction of the machine, the audits would catch it," Becker said.
Conspiracy theory: Immigrants who have crossed the border illegally are voting by the millions -
"That is 100% false," Becker said. "Every single voter has to give a driver's license number or social security number, which is matched against files, databases that are held to make sure the voter is who they say they are, and they're eligible to vote. And we also know that states who have gone looking for non-citizens voters have found shockingly few even potential non-citizen registrants."
Becker pointed to Ohio.
"Ohio just recently announced that in a period of time of over a decade it had found six possible cases of non-citizens voting," he said.
The key to confidence in the 2024 election
Paper ballots are key to giving voters confidence in the 2024 election, Becker said. Ninety five percent of Americans will vote on paper ballots, which are verifiable and auditable.
"And then we audit those ballots, which means we do hand counts of the ballots to compare them to the machine counts, to make sure the machine's got the right result," he said.
Becker explained why voters should trust people working the election.
"I can tell you, I've been working with election officials for over a quarter of a century," he said. "And when you talk to these election officials out there, Republicans and Democrats, they don't do this because it makes them rich and famous."
They do it because it's a calling, Becker said.
George Harrison, Beverly Woityra and Paul Petruska, trained poll workers in Cobb County, Georgia, are among those who answered that calling. In their experience, if there's a problem, it's nearly always because of a mistake the voter made.
They'll listen to election doubters vent and answer their questions. Petruska shared a message for voters.
"Stay off the internet. Listen to the people, come down here and talk to us," Petruska said. "Fact check with more than Facebook and TikTok."
He also urged them to stop listening to gossip about elections.
People need to have faith in the ballot, Sterling said, adding that election workers have done a lot of work to ensure voters can confidently accept election results.
"Every state in this country now has poked and prodded and looked at their processes. And we know that while we all do it slightly differently, everybody assures that there's one person and one vote. Everybody assures that there's a single ballot cast," Sterling said. "Nearly every state in the Union now has audits after the fact. Every state in the Union tests their equipment beforehand in a public way."
What should voters expect on Election Day
There will be breakdowns, mistakes and disinformation this year, but none of that should be confused with election-altering fraud, Becker said.
Come Election Day, voters shouldn't expect to get results quickly in many races.
"Definitely don't expect to know who controls the United States House of Representatives. There are a lot of very close races, even in places like California, that will take days or maybe even weeks to resolve. The Senate we might know a little bit sooner, but unclear," Becker said. "We probably will have a pretty good idea who won the presidency maybe around Thursday or Friday."
That's because the race is essentially tied, including in Georgia, where Sterling is hoping America can endure its next close election without coming apart.
"I know that 2024 will be the safest and most secure election in history," Sterling said. "It will be the most scrutinized election in history. And whoever the winner is, be it Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, we will know that they are the correct winner at the end of the day."