Georgia Secretary of State Says Donald Trump 'Knows in His Heart That He Lost'

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has said former President Donald Trump "knows in his heart that he lost" the 2020 presidential election ahead of his visit to the state on Saturday.

Raffensperger was interviewed by The Washington Examiner on Friday and reaffirmed that Trump "lost the election fair and square" but acknowledged it was difficult to counteract the former president's claims due to his platform.

Trump will speak at a Save America rally at the Georgia National Fairgrounds in Perry, Georgia, on Saturday and is expected to repeat claims of voter fraud in the last election.

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Raffensperger told the newspaper: "What bothers me, and it really should bother everyone, after 10 months since the last ballots were counted, we're still dealing with this misinformation and disinformation surrounding the elections."

Last week, Trump sent a letter to Raffensperger and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp asking them to decertify the 2020 election results and citing 43,000 absentee ballots in DeKalb County that he claimed had been counted but had violated the chain of custody rules.

Raffensperger said on Friday that they were investigating the matter in DeKalb County and had opened that investigation three weeks ago because "some information came to us that there was a question about chain of custody."

However, the secretary of state said that such allegations would not invalidate the ballots because they were checked through signature matching. Each absentee ballot was traced back to the voter's absentee ballot request in order to be verified.

Raffensperger appeared to predict that Trump would return to the topic of the 2020 election during his remarks on Saturday.

"He's going to come, and he's going to say what he's going to say, but he knows in his heart that he lost the election," Raffensperger said.

"He's continued to promote the big lie, and then he's also fundraising off this issue just like Stacey Abrams has," he went on.

Abrams was the Democratic candidate who ran against Kemp in 2018 and refused to concede, citing the purging of 1.4 million voters from Georgia's voter rolls. She has previously rejected the comparison to Trump.

Raffensperger said Georgia had conducted recounts, audits and investigations of the 2020 election but found no evidence of widespread voter fraud or administrative errors.

"Every time we've looked into all of these and all of these concerns, it's clear that Donald Trump lost the election fair and square," he said.

However, Raffensperger appeared to acknowledge that the former president still had major reach for his claims and that it is difficult to compete with him.

"We are not going to win that bullhorn argument," he said.