Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling forcefully rebutted the conspiracy theories pushed by Donald Trump and many of his supporters in a detailed, rapid-fire press conference Monday afternoon, with his comments sprinkled with descriptions like “intentionally misled” and “ridiculous claims” and “that’s not real” and “wild claims.” Oh, and “fantastical.”
“This is all easily, provably false,” he said of the conspiracy theories. “And yet the president persists.” Asked by reporters about Trump’s phone call threatening Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger if he didn’t “find” enough votes to overturn the election, Sterling took a deep breath and said “I personally found it 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.”
Sterling’s closing message in his prepared remarks was a return to the importance of voting. “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,” he said. “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 are taking away your important voice from this election.”
There are a lot of conspiracy theories being pushed by Team Trump, from ballots that were supposedly scanned multiple times to claims that people who are dead or under the age of 18 or otherwise ineligible to vote. Sterling debunked them one by one, going minute by minute through a supposedly incriminating video, citing elections data from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania counties that use Dominion voting machines, and offering exact numbers of people who investigations revealed fell into the categories of ineligible voters Team Trump has screamed about. In the cases of 66,000 people who supposedly voted despite being under 18, “the actual number is zero.” Same with thousands of people who supposedly voted without being registered. And so on.
Sterling’s irritation was palpable—at several moments he stopped and visibly searched for diplomatic language to express a thought that was in a saltier form in his mind. Answering reporters’ questions, he repeatedly refused to offer specifics about threats to in-person voting on Tuesday, and evaded on whether or how Trump’s phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger will be investigated.
Go figure, Fox News cut out early in its coverage of Sterling’s press conference.