On Twitter, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger sent a message of congratulations to his hometown’s Major League Baseball championship team, but he added a diss that’s getting pushback.
“Congrats to the @braves on becoming World Series champs,” Raffensperger tweeted. “Let’s hope Stacey Abrams accepts the results.”
The comment was shared by journalist Jemele Hill, who called the note a “jerk move.”
Hill isn’t the only person who commented on the tweet. Another Twitter user said, “This is so unnecessary and rude. You could have tried to be classy and congratulate our team. Don’t you represent all of us, including Stacey Abrams? But you have to take a swipe at a black woman. I’m embarrassed.”
Other users were quick to point out that it was not Abrams most recently who accused the Georgia Secretary of State of election fraud or refusing to accept election results. Raffensperger himself recorded former President Donald Trump on a phone call asking him to “find” nearly 11,000 votes and overturn Georgia’s election results certifying Joe Biden as winner of the Nov. 2020 presidential election.
“If your party didn’t unlawfully disenfranchise democratic voters, people of color, and low-income voters specifically, and Abrams lost, she would’ve conceded. But that didn’t happen bc you all knew she could’ve won. Trump had no proof of voter fraud but Abrams had plenty,” one tweeter commented.
Raffensperger released a new book Tuesday, which was an election day in America. Integrity Counts is said to tell his story of being “threatened” by the former president. He recounts that his wife received death threats, and his home was staked out during the certification process.
“I felt then — and still believe today — that this was a threat,” Raffensperger writes, according to the Associated Press. “Others obviously thought so, too, because some of Trump’s more radical followers have responded as if it was their duty to carry out this threat.”
But, on the evening of the Braves win, it was not Trump who Raffensperger chose to mention distainfully in his tweet, from his official Twitter account, but former state Rep. Abrams.
Raffensperger argues in Integrity Counts that Abrams and other Democrats seek to “undermine” Democracy in Georgia. However, Abrams has only argued against the removal of legitimate voters from registration rolls, not overturning actual votes.
Ironically, of elected leaders, Raffensperger writes: “If we don’t have people of the highest character run for elective office, we will continue to fight disinformation, misinformation and outright deception, and the end result will be an erosion of public trust.”
“We need the people who hold public office,” he asserts, “to continually strive for the noble causes in life with noble behavior.”
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