This is what the right now considers a scandal:
In several videos posted to YouTube, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger begged Chinese-Americans to vote for him by mail in his 2015 Georgia House of Representatives race. Raffensperger went on to win this race by 159 votes.
The videos, apparently recorded in Raffensperger’s home, seem to be tied to Atlanta 168, a Chinese-American community located in Georgia. Raffensperger is seen in one video begging for at least 100 votes from the Chinese community, specifically suggesting they use absentee voting.
“Some of you may be going out of town,” said Raffensperger. “We brought applications today that you can fill out, we’ll even give you envelopes with a stamp on it. You can fill it out, and the Board of Elections will send you your absentee ballot, and you can just fill it out and send it back.”
The story is from National File, a website edited by Tom Pappert, who used to write for a wingnut site called Big League Politics and has been known to appear on Alex Jones's InfoWars broadcast. National File made news during the 2020 when it accurately reported on explicit texts sent by North Carolina Senate candidate Cal Cunningham to a woman who was not his wife, and then falsely accused Mark Kelly, a Senate candidate from Arizona, of dressing as Hitler for a 1985 Halloween party. Cunningham lost his race; Kelly won his.
The scandal in Raffensperger's case, according to National File, is that Raffensperger attended to a gathering of Chinese-American citizens and urged them to vote for him. That's all he did. Watch the video. This was a perfectly innocuous candidate forum in someone's house, like the ones candidates conduct in every election. (Atlanta168.com is a web portal for Chinese-Americans in the Atlanta area.)
The right doesn't like Brad Raffensperger because he chose to follow the law rather than the demands of his own party when he ratified Joe Biden's victory in his state. National File is suggesting here that it's sinister for Raffensperger -- and, presumably, any other politician -- merely to associate with people of Chinese descent. I don't have to explain how dangerous this message is, do I?
Published with permission of No More Mr. Nice Blog
