Gabe Sterling

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

Well, it's been one month since the election.

Despite all the vote counts that have left no actual question that Joe Biden won, President Trump and a vocal group of his supporters have kept contesting the results.

There's no proof of anything major going wrong, and judges keep tossing out the challenges.

So now we're into conspiracy theories that are getting harder and harder to follow about voting machines and Hugo Chavez and China.

And that has led to low-profile election officials now needing police protection.

It has all gone too

far.

This is Gabe Sterling.

He is the voting system implementation manager for the state of Georgia.

Joe DeGeneva today asked for Chris Krebs, a patriot who ran CISA, to be shot.

A 20-something tech in Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out saying he should be hung for treason.

It has to stop.

Mr.

President, you have not condemned these actions or this language.

Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions.

This has to stop.

We need you to step up and if you're going to take a position of leadership, show some.

Sterling's press conference earlier this week struck a nerve with people.

It can be easy to dismiss what's going on right now as crazy or just what comes with our polarized political reality.

But there's a real human cost to this.

Sterling and other voting administrators around the country just pulled off the feet of a well-run election in a pandemic.

It doesn't matter that Sterling is a lifelong Republican and calls himself just a functionary.

He's under attack for doing his job.

I wanted to know more about what this whole experience is like for the people living through it.

So, Sterling is my guest this week.

We talk about the election and how he thinks we got to this dangerous place.

And I ask him about where the GOP stands in all this.

Infighting over Georgia results has split Sterling's party.

The president has attacked the governor.

Both Republican senators have attacked the Secretary of State.

And all of them are Republicans who will need to come together next month when Georgia holds two more Senate elections if they want to keep their majority in the Senate.

So here's my conversation with Gabe Sterling.

Thanks for being here on the ticket.

Thank you, Isaac.

So can you just take me back to start to election night when you start to get the sense that it's going to be a weird period for you?

Election night, it wasn't.

In fact, in election night, we were sort of in victory lap mode, considering what had happened in June with the new system, that there was a couple of counties that really screwed the pooch, which they reflected on us.

So we worked really hard to avoid getting lines.

We worked really hard to get people to do pre-election day voting.

So we were really churning and burning and we were doing great.

And the results started coming in like we were doing great.

And I've been around politics stuff for a while.

At this point, more people know about this than ought to.

I used to be a political consultant and I was a candidate a couple of times.

I was on city council.

So I kind of know this stuff.

I lived in DC, worked on the Hill.

I was a really good vote counter.

So when I started looking at what was coming in and what was out, it was really Wednesday afternoon, evening when I kind of knew,

I basically was talking to people in the office and said, look, this is going to get hard.

And they're like, well, why?

I said, because given what's out there right now, the president's probably going to lose by about 10,000 votes.

He may not.

We'll keep looking at it, but it's kind of knowing what's out there still to come in from the larger urban counties from the absentee ballots.

The bad part is the way it kind of came in because the larger urban counties, which happens to be the Democrat base, happen to have more votes and happen to move slower but that's always been that way and that's why we kind of knew there was gonna be an issue starting around then but we had done everything we could and had a really secure election we had you know put together an absentee ballot portal which is a better way to identify people for their ballot requests and all of our stuff is available for public inspection the entire absentee ballot program and everything else

And the funny part was both sides were kind of holding fire because they didn't know which one was going to come in first.

They couldn't start attacking the state until they knew who had really come in first.

So they all, they both kind of held off for about a week or so.

And then it got to be the point where it was obviously that the president had fallen behind slightly and nearly everything was in.

And we had gotten into that first week to get ready for certification of the counties.

And then from there, we had the Friday was the last day for the military ballots to come in after the Election Day Tuesday.

for all the cures to be done for any problems on any absentee ballots.

And that's when you can really close everything out and get everything uploaded.

So really by Monday, Tuesday, we kind of knew this is where we're at.

At that point, I think it was give or take 14,000 votes.

And

when you think back on just this past month,

would you, if you could right at this moment, get in a time machine and tell yourself on election night what this month had been like, would it make any sense to you at that point, like how this is unrolled?

See, it doesn't make any sense to me now.

Let alone if I told myself back then and then.

Like, what are you talking about?

We just had a great election.

Everything's great.

So,

because the problem at some point, you start dealing with irrationality.

I mean, the law, it's a new law for our state on this section where we basically had a pre-certification audit.

We had chosen several months ago to do a risk-limiting audit.

Now, in a normal situation, let's say you have a margin of like 5% or 6%, you'd go around and you would do a statistical sampling.

you know, the tool you put it in, it tells you you pull ballot 17 from batch three in Habersham County, and you take all those, you put them into a tool run an algorithm and say you're at 98 you know certainty that the outcome of this election was correct from these machines to say that the machines scanned everything perfectly

but in this case the presidential race at that point was 0.28 percent was the margin and so we made the decision to do the presidential race as our risk limiting audit and since it was so close you essentially had to do a hand retally because that was when the first disinformation that the dominion voting systems were flipping votes right or doing algorithms or doing fractional votes or all the other happy crap you heard.

I said, if we do this and it comes out right, and prayerfully it did.

So, in fact, when we finished it, we were at 0.1053% off on the number of ballots and 0.0099% off on the margin, which is insane because the normal hand recount, you're at 1 or 2% off.

But because we have ballot marking devices, your listeners may not know what that is.

A ballot marking device, in most of the country, you have a old scantron bubble sheet things we used to do for SATs and stuff.

You vote that way if you're voting absentee in Georgia.

If you're voting in person, which 75% of Georgians did either by early voting or voting election day, use a ballot marking device where you go through, you make decisions on a screen.

You say, print your ballot.

It prints your ballot.

It has a little QR code on it, but it has a list in English of all your choices.

You review that, say, okay, that's who I voted for.

You put it into a scanner.

So there's no ambiguity.

There's no, let's figure this out, what this guy really meant.

There's no X's.

There's no stray marks.

There's no none of that stuff.

So it was very easy for the human beings who did that hand tally, because there was no machinery involved at all.

It was all done by hand, all counted by hand, then all put onto tally sheets, which we're working to get uploaded so everybody can see the tally sheets.

We're trying to be as transparent as we can.

We figured, okay, if we do this and it came out that good, surely this will kill the idea that these machines did something untoward.

We were wrong.

Facts and data don't seem to really matter.

It must be, look, you have your job that you are sworn to do, but you are a Republican.

Did you vote for Donald Trump?

Yeah.

To watch this go down is not what you wanted to have happen.

But as you said, I'm sworn to do a job.

Right.

So just, I mean, can you talk me through how you reconcile those two things that are pulling at you?

One is you would like Donald Trump to have won a second term.

You would have liked him to win Georgia on his way to winning a second term.

And the other is you have your job to do.

And obviously, there are reasons why you wanted Donald Trump to be the president for four more years.

It's not just out of nothing, right?

And you've been in politics your whole life.

I've been a republican for 15 years old.

I couldn't conscience abide.

I mean,

but you know, I'm not saying that's it.

It is what it is right now.

And when you do this job, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, because this is a partisan position and people hire partisans.

And

the whole idea of these nonpartisan panels, there's no such freaking thing.

Everybody has their own feelings and their own thoughts and stuff.

It's impossible to be nonpartisan.

People say they are completely independent, nonpartisan, or not being honest with themselves.

They may say they want to be a part of a party, but they have their own ideas.

But I think it's also not necessarily easy, but if you've got a job to do, you just do the job.

Well, I think it's sort of like from journalists,

when journalists say they don't, they're completely objective.

They have no, every, you're a human being.

You have thoughts on things.

There's a way to separate what your personal thoughts are from what the job is.

Right.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

And

it is hard because, you know, I've in my state, I'm a known partisan.

It's not like I'm just a random person.

I mean, I've run for office as a Republican.

I was on a city council.

It was not a partisan, but I was pretty, well, obviously, a Republican.

I went to state conventions.

I mean, I ran a congressional campaign for a Republican in 1994 in the big wave.

I mean, I am a known entity.

To try to say that I'm not would be ridiculous, almost as ridiculous as saying the Dominion voting machines flip votes.

I mean,

then you've got you're in the crosshairs of the president and all of the...

We don't say crosshairs given the certain...

No, that is...

I'm sorry.

You're correct.

But, I mean, I guess that maybe gets what I was.

trying to ask

in not a great way,

which is that all of you have been made the center of attention by all of these people who are not doing it because they've reviewed the votes that's because they don't like where the votes landed and so you as to use your own word a functionary um are suddenly thrown into the middle of this in a way that you never would have been absolutely i mean it's and it's unfortunate because i was a lot more eloquent when i was angry um than i am right now but i did say the words if you want a position of leadership show some

And that really is a thing that seems to have resonated with a lot of people.

When I went up there, I had no clue what I was going to say.

And anybody who's watched most of my briefings, I might have occasional notes and I'll pull my computer out and tell people numbers, but I'm never scripted.

I found out about an hour, hour and a half earlier about the young man who was a technician.

He had just taken a job as an elections technician for Dominion as a contractor.

And these crazy conspiracy theorist guys took videos of him, of him doing an innocent part of his job of taking a report off an election management computer and taking it over to a counting computer because we're notoriously cheap and we don't want to pay for a license on for Excel on the election management computer.

So you move it over to a counting computer so you can read a report on the batches as a check and balance for the recount.

And they said he's manipulating votes.

He's changing things.

We've got you.

He's committing treason.

They put that out as his QAnon crazies.

They put that out on

Twitter and wherever else they put it.

And within minutes, they got the guy's name.

It's a very unique name.

So they started harassing his family members.

And then the thing that I saw when I talked to the Dominion project manager, she was audibly upset when I talked to her on the phone.

There had been a tweet that said the kid's name, you have committed treason.

May God have mercy on your soul with a gif with a noose just swinging slightly.

I mean, it was creepy.

It was scary.

And at that point, I was like, I'm done.

This is, I mean,

I took a higher profile job.

I've had police protection outside my house for a couple of weeks.

The secretary ran for office.

He's had people trespass.

They've been have caravans go around.

His wife's gave these sexualized threats.

But again, I'm not saying it's par for the course and no one should accept it, but you kind of like, well, crap, you know, you put yourself out there.

That's going to happen.

This kid just took a job.

Right.

And he does not deserve this.

And neither do those hundreds of thousands of other elections workers around the country who are being questioned about what they're doing.

They're just doing their jobs.

And like Chris Krebs said, this was the most secure election in the history of the United States.

It definitely was the most secure election in the history of Georgia.

We literally had a hand tally to show everybody that the ballots ballots were counted the right way.

But what does it tell you about what's going on in politics?

And look, you are a longtime Republican.

I think it is hard to

say that this is a both sides kind of issue.

This is something that...

is much more, at least in this moment, prevalent among the Republican Party, the conspiracy theories here.

I should say, let me just say to you that

I can remember a conversation that I had in early 2017 with someone who was a political operative in Michigan, who was a Hillary Clinton supporter, who was telling me about the undervotes and how maybe there would be an impeachment and Mike Pence would have to get impeached with Donald Trump.

And so Nancy Pelosi was going to become president.

And so, like, that thinking is not purely a Republican kind of thing.

I do think that what is more prevalent right now among Republicans is this like really looping conspiracy thinking that hooks hooks into QAnon and all this sort of stuff and then gets more violent.

I think that, let's go back a couple of things.

2018, Stacey Abrams still has yet to concede.

That's true.

In Georgia, you are right.

Clearly,

the lawsuits and the arguments are eerily similar to the Trump people's arguments now versus the Abrams people in 2018.

But if you see the extremes on both sides, they both get to that loopy conspiracy thing.

And there's something about the human brain at some level that I think is always there.

That,

and I think honestly, COVID feeds into part of this because it feeds into everything right now.

You're isolated as much.

You don't have as much humanity around you.

And social media then feeds into it.

And you're in your own trench.

And that's true of both sides.

But right now, you have who ought to be a legitimate figure at this point and a responsible figure, the President of the United States, who goes on a 46-minute video,

essentially rereading every internet rumor and idea that has been debunked, knocked down, disproven, like with data and physical evidence and still says it, which then feeds into these things.

I have family members have to argue with us about this.

Oh, we love you, Gabe.

We know you're right, but what about this?

And I'm like, guys, it's all a load of crap.

It's not, it's not believed.

Why are you even believing it?

Yes, I get it.

You can't understand we lost because you don't know anybody who voted for Joe Biden.

You know, it's just similar to that thing back in, I think it was 72 in New York.

And they were interviewing a woman.

She goes, I cannot believe Nixon won.

I don't know anybody that voted for him.

All right, we're going to take a short break.

We'll be back in a moment with Gabe Sterling.

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Isn't the violence, I mean, and you are absolutely right that Stacey Abrams has still not conceded from the 2018 race and will probably never concede even as she gets ready to run again in 2022.

And that this thinking is around.

But in 2018, no one had to get police protection.

I don't know the answer to that question, honestly.

Not like this.

Not like this.

This is dangerous.

And nobody had cars.

However, we have had protests outside the governor's mansion from BRICS

during the height of the BLM situation.

Not as much rioting in Atlanta, but it's there.

We should never be in a situation in our country where rioting or violence feels like the only outlet you have.

And part of the problem right now with the president is if you undermine the elections,

a friend of mine who's sort of a, I'm not going to call him a leftist, but he's left-leaning.

He says, the reason we have ballots is so we don't have to deal with it with bullets.

If you aren't saying, well, the ballots don't matter anymore, what's the next logical step?

Right.

After you spoke out, Senator David Perdue said, he had a spokesman say that he condemns violence of any kind against anybody, period.

We won't apologize for addressing the obvious issues with the way our state conducts its elections.

Georgians deserve accountability and improvements to that process, and we're fighting to make sure the January 5th election is safe, secure, transparent, and accurate.

Now, it would seem to me that what that statement is doing is saying he doesn't condemn violence, but not condemning the thinking that leads to the violence or threats of violence.

Well, he didn't say it, a spokesman said it.

That's part of the problem I have with this.

Listen, Senator Loeffler said a spokesman.

Senator Perdue said a spokesman.

President Trump said a spokesman.

President Trump then just said the opposite of what the spokesman said with a tweet that he did right after it.

Senator Perdue and Senator Loffler, I feel bad for them.

They're stuck in a box and the president put them in it.

You're going to toe this line with me or I'm going to torpedo your campaigns.

Right.

But you're a Republican voter in Georgia.

You are seeing what's going on.

Both of them are running in runoff elections for their seats in January.

Can you, in good conscience, vote for senators who you think are not being leaders like the way you want them to be?

Well, because I think the other senators are in worse shape on that front on some things.

But yeah, I have one of their signs in my yard.

Even though they asked for my boss to resign, yes, it's horrible cognitive dissonance.

I get it.

It's going to be hard for anybody to reconcile in their head.

But like I said, I've been a Republican since I was 15.

I'm going to fight for the sanity and sanctity of my party.

And you don't do that by walking away from it.

You do that by trying to get people to do the right thing.

And I think that senators Purdue and Loffler would get more votes if they follow a line that was a little more based on reality and not so much based on the fact that they are terrified of pissing off the Trump-based voters.

Does it worry you as someone who wants to see them re-elected that the people who are protesting the count now are saying don't vote Republican, don't vote in these runoff elections?

It's loony tunes.

It's freaking looney tunes.

Lynn Wood and Sidney Powell got up there and said, you should protest and not vote at all.

I mean, Lynn Wood hadn't voted in the Republican primaries in 2004.

And these people are listening to him.

He's wearing a MAGA hat and he won some really big verdicts.

He called me out by name in the last rally saying, we're not going to sell our votes to China.

I don't even know what the hell that means.

So

it's crazy.

And then the president's coming to Georgia on Saturday to campaign for these people.

And now you have people on the left behind billboards saying Senator Leffler and Senator Prudue didn't stand up for President Trump.

Let's not stand up for them i mean it's tactically brilliant but the the president the president of the united states has laid the foundation for all this

we are the the oldest democracy in the world and here we are finishing this major historic election i think the politicians were right to say that this was probably the most important election in at least modern american history if not in american history and we are leaving it with not by chance but by the actions that you're describing people feeling less confident in our democracy and in the vote than maybe ever before.

What do you think that that means for the future?

I think it's going to take a lot to rebuild trust.

And the problem is when people get alienated from the process, we've already seen a bifurcation culturally, socioeconomically in a lot of these things.

And populists on both sides can stoke those situations.

This is going to sound quaint.

I'm sort of a good government, small government.

The government that governs best governs least, you don't have to think about it.

Your road just ought to be paved.

Your election just ought to go off.

The streetlights ought to be timed.

The police ought to show up.

But as you get further away from that, and we start getting into a place where you, it's not just my opponent, it's an enemy.

And then you get to a cultural place where there's nothing but distrust on either side.

And I can get into a longer rant about how all this started in 86, but we won't get into that.

It started going downhill from there.

And it was the Bork nomination that started us down this path from my point of view.

As you see institutions continue to get undermined, everybody gets hurt in the long run, especially on the functionality side.

The whole point from our point of view is: we run good elections.

We run safe and secure elections.

That's what we have to do.

And that's our job.

We'll continue to follow the law.

We had a state senator ask us today, how could you certify this election with these, you know, these signature matches and everything else?

And our general counsel looked at him and said, we follow the law that your legislature passed.

That's what we did.

So we will continue to do that

if president trump came on his trip to georgia on saturday if he came and sat down in your office with you right now where you are what would you show him to make him you think believe the election results or is there anything that you could show him well there's two things i don't know if he believes it i think he does now after watching that 46 minute video because he's been telling people he knows he lost but There's nothing I think that I could say or do or show him that's going to make him believe that it didn't happen.

Now, the problem is many of the things he's talked about, like Dominion voting systems are the problem.

Again, simple, straightforward math.

In the counties in Wisconsin where they use dominion voting machines, he got 59% of the vote.

In the counties where they use dominion voting machines in Pennsylvania, he got 52.5% of the vote.

In 130-something counties in Georgia where they used dominion voting machines, he won.

He lost in some other places where, guess what?

Any Republican was going to lose.

The reason he lost this state was because there was about...

Let's just take eight counties alone in Metro and then Athens, Clark County, where the University of Georgia is, where David Perdue got 19,000 more votes than President Trump.

I mean, that's the margin by itself.

There's no weird political science anomaly here.

This is all, if you watch what happened in Cobb and Gwinnett counties, who were two suburban counties that went from Republican to Democrat over the last 10 years, it shocked people.

I'm like, then y'all have not been paying attention.

And maybe if the president hadn't said, hey, don't use vote by mail, maybe we would have had a different outcome.

All right.

With that, Isaac, I got.

All right.

Thanks for being here.

I appreciate it.

Thanks, man.

Bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

That'll do it for this week of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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