Brad Raffensperger wins re-election as Georgia Secretary of State

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger won re-election Tuesday, defeating a challenge from Democrat Bee Nguyen, who conceded the race before midnight on election day.

Raffensperger, who gained national attention in the wake of the 2020 presidential election controversy, was leading in his bid to win re-election Tuesday in the state’s 2022 midterms.

As of 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, Raffensperger was leading Nguyen, a former state lawmaker who had the strong backing of Democrat Stacey Abrams in her gubernatorial campaign, with 54% of the vote to Nguyen’s 43%. Nguyen confirmed on Twitter around 11:30 that she had conceded.

Full interactive results of Georgia’s Nov. 8 elections

Raffensperger was at the center of one of the nation’s most violent political storms in recent history. Two years ago, Raffensperger repeatedly rebuffed then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the state’s presidential election results, and refuted claims of widespread voter fraud in Georgia. Joe Biden became the first Democratic White House candidate to carry Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992, winning the Peach State by .23%.

Who holds the balance of power? Full interactive results of the nation’s Nov. 8 elections

Georgia was also the only Deep South state to vote Democratic in the 2020 presidential election.

Raffensperger won a crowded, May 24 GOP secretary of state primary by defeating, among others, the Trump-endorsed candidacy of Jody Hice.

Earlier this year, Raffensperger testified before the Democrat-organized House Select Committee investigataing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that Trump’s claims of 2020 election fraud “were false.”

Raffensperger told the committee the Nov. 6, 2020, election went “remarkably smooth. “I felt we had a successful election,” he said.

The committee also focused on a phone call that Raffensperger received on Jan. 2 from Trump, in which he asked Georgia’s top elections official “to find 11,780 votes” in order to overturn Georgia’s results.

Nguyen was elected in December 2017 to fill Abrams’ seat in the state House; Abrams had resigned the seat in to focus on her campaign for governor the following year.

Nguyen is the first Vietnamese-American elected to the state House, and was seeking to become the first Vietnamese-American to be elected to a Georgia statewide constitutional office.