Any speculation as to why a guy who has a long record of being a loyal republican would work to undermine the republican presidential candidate? If there was fraud at the county level, particularly a county dominated by dems, wouldn't he have every reason to pursue that?
Yes. There are a few things that have put Kemp and Raffensperger in self-protection mode over the election. I'm sure there's more to it than what I have here, but its a start.
First is the decision to purchase the Dominion Voting System just prior to the 2020 election. The decision was made in mid-2019, giving the state months until the 2020 primaries. That's a tight time frame to implement a completely new, state wide system with 30,000 machines. Dominion cost the state $107 million up front, with an installed cost of nearly $150 million. The state is also covering ongoing licensing fees from Dominion.
The system was criticized from the beginning as many problems had been identified from prior use in other states. Several states including Texas have rejected Dominion bids due to security issues which had not been addressed. No state, other than Georgia, uses Dominion systems state-wide, and no other state uses Dominion to manage their system.
The Ware County elections office would later make a video demonstrating the ease with which an election manager could change votes and results as easily as moving and deleting files and directories in Windows File Explorer.
The state went cheap on installation. Instead of hiring professionals to install and secure the system, which was deemed to be too expensive, the state made a strange move to "hire" a state employee as an independent contractor to manage implementation.
Gabriel Sterling, COO of the Secretary of State's office, was given a contract to implement the new system, despite having zero experience in computer systems management. He's spent his career in politics. Raffensperger had to hire an additional contractor to take over Sterling's day to day responsibilities in the office.
Sterling set up a new company just for this contract. He has no other employees - its just him. Given his lack of experience, knowledge and staffing, Sterling essentially outsourced the whole project to Dominion, with him "managing" on behalf of the SOS.
Raffensperger made several other gaffes. He made an agreement with Stacy Abrams' group, ironically named "Fair Fight," to change absentee ballot handling procedures. He did not have the legal authority to change state law on voting processes. Raffensperger attempted to blame the Attorney General's office for advising him to take the agreement.
At the end of the day, Raffensperger got played by Democrats, who implemented a statewide network of volunteers (not election officials) to help "cure" faulty ballots from declared Democrat voters. Raffensperger did not share the terms with the Republican Party, who only found out about the agreement through county election officials and FOIA requests after it was too late to act on it.
Abrams was also able to push through legislation to require all counties to accept email applications for absentee ballots. This also affected the verification process, which now requires an absurd set of requirements to reject a ballot by signature verification - making it impossible to use given the volume of absentee ballots requested for the 2020 election. This made the absentee ballot system very easy to cheat, as you would only need a person's drivers license number to get an absentee ballot and vote, with little chance of being caught.
Raffensperger never accepted responsibility for this decision and would be reluctant to show how many questionable ballots it produced.
Just days before early voting began, the SOS office pushed out system software changes to the entire state. The changes were distributed on memory sticks, which increased the risk of malware or faulty installations.
In conflict with Georgia law, the updates did not allow time for the machines to be recertified before early voting started. This error could have (and some say should have) invalidated the election. Raffensperger has liability for authorizing the illegal update, which left all of Georgia's machines uncertified by law.
In short, Raffensperger's decisions are all over the many issues with Georgia's election process. Taking the blame means taking the lawsuits and the liability. That puts him in the odd position of working to conceal what actually happened in several large Georgia counties.
