Georgia’s top election officials reject Trump call to ‘find’ more votes

ATLANTA Georgia — President Donald Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the state’s presidential election.

In the call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, which was recorded, Trump repeatedly cited disproven claims of fraud and raises the prospect of a “criminal offense” if officials did not change the vote count.

But at a news conference on Monday afternoon, the office of Georgia's top elections official again pushed back against the president’s assertions.

Gabriel Sterling, the voting systems implementation manager for the Secretary of State's office, echoed his boss in saying that Trump is relying on debunked theories.

“It was pretty obvious pretty early on that we’d debunked every one of those theories early on,” Raffensperger told ABC News earlier Monday, “but President Trump continues to believe them.”

Saturday’s phone call was the latest step in an unprecedented effort by a sitting president to press a state official to reverse the outcome of a free and fair election that he lost.

Trump told Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”

Georgia counted its votes three times before certifying Biden’s win by a 11,779-vote margin.

In an interview Monday, Raffensperger told The Associated Press that he is confident in Georgia’s general election outcome, despite an electoral college challenge supported by some Republicans in Congress.

“If they support a challenge of the electors for Georgia, they’re wrong, dead wrong,” Raffensperger said. Members of Congress will have to make a decision about the other states, he added, “but in Georgia, we did get it right. I’m not happy with the result, as a Republican, but it is the right result based on the numbers that we saw cast.”