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Georgia Election Officials Debunk Trump Conspiracies; Officials Say Not a Bit of Truth to Trump's Claims That Voting Machines Were Tampered With; U.S. Considers Cutting Moderna Vaccine Doses in Half to Speed Up Rollout. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired January 04, 2021 - 15:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[15:30:00]

GABRIEL STERLING, GEORGIA SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION MANAGER: We are continuing investigations, there are questions about pristine ballots, as one last thing. The pristine ballot thing, there are three reasons you can have the quote, unquote, pristine ballot, which is essentially the absentee/emergency/provisional ballot.

There's first one, military and overseas voters oftentimes will get what they call an electronic ballot. What happens is once we get the ballot built starting the 49th night to the 45th day, we will send e- mails out to those people who want to have electronic ballot delivery, which many of our military service men and women.

So they take that , they print it and they bubble in their choices. Now obviously that's not 8.5 by 11 piece of paper or 11 by 14 where they can print it on, so it's not sized properly to go through a scanner. So when that comes back to the county, they will duplicate that on a flat unfolded piece or paper on the absentee ballot/emergency ballot. That's a normal process for many of the military and overseas voters that are electronically delivered.

The other situation you might see that in is in an emergency ballot situation. If a ballot marking device goes down or wasn't used, which is the case we saw in the morning in Spaulding County on election day, they would use the emergency ballots as backup. And those will just be scanned directly in the machine and not folded.

And the final place you would see that is on a damaged or adjudicated ballot that was not adjudicated through the electronic system. Or in Fulton's case, what you saw was they were putting so many of the absentee ballots through their cutters that occasionally would catch the ballot itself and slice it.

In Fulton County's case, they did the vast majority, I think a 100 percent of their duplication on a BMD.

In Cobb County's location I think they did all those on hand marked paper ballots.

So there's a difference of use and process within each one of the counties. That's why you would see quote, unquote pristine ballots.

Wednesday. We have all heard the reports that there is going to be several Senators and Congressmen who will be objecting to the electors being seated. We anticipate that each time they do that, they're going to go, they'll separate out, they'll have a debate for two hours. The state of Georgia's electors will get seated. They will look at this evidence as best they can in such a way and it will be voted on by the House and Senate. We anticipate that. And that will prove our certification was proper by the end of the day and that we followed the process properly.

I give you back to Senator Tom Cotton's statement from earlier today that says this is the process that we follow. It's the appropriate step under the constitution of the laws of the state of Georgia and the laws of the United States.

So with that I want to say if you're a Georgia voter, if you want your values reflected by your elected officials, I strongly beg and encourage you, go vote tomorrow. Do not let anybody discourage you. Do not self-suppress your own vote. Do not make a self-fulfilling prophecy out of doing this. Don't let anybody steal your vote that way.

And that's what's happening. If you self-suppress, you are taking away your important voice from this election. So with that, I'll go ahead and take any questions you all got.

Sorry. So, I got to know if there's a microphone back there. Justin.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, yes, is the Secretary of State or the State Election Board considering asking either the Fulton D.A. or the Georgia Attorney General to investigate the call with the president over the weekend?

STERLING: I do not know that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Any discussions of that?

STERLING: Not that I'm aware of.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: From all that you said there, I mean do you believe, as someone said, that what happened in that phone call was an attack --

STERLING: I'm having a really hard time hearing you. I apologize.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you believe that someone said this is an attack on democracy --

STERLING: There we go, I can hear that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: -- I'll start again.

STERLING: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As someone said, do you believe what happened in that phone call was an attack on democracy?

STERLING: I'll leave other people to make the decision on that. I personally found it to be something that was not normal, out of place. And nobody I know who would be president would do something like that to a Secretary of State.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you.

STERLING: Yes, Mark.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Afternoon. Looking forward to tomorrow. Have you heard about any threats or security problems or anything that could interfere with people voting, and also, what do you expect turnout to be like tomorrow?

STERLING: Well, I anticipate there will be a high turnout, and there is a large bucket of voters in many Congressional districts that could potentially show up. We anticipate there could be any number of potential threats out there that could be attempting to encourage or discourage turnout. We encourage everybody to please turn out and be safe, be smart, and don't let anybody get in the way of you casting your vote.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And have you heard about any threats? Will there be extra security?

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STERLING: We've discussed with GBI, FBI and sheriff's departments potentially there being threats and we've seen some of that nature potentially out there. They're under investigation.

Yes.

BLAYNE ALEXANDER, JOURNALIST, NBC NEWS: Hi Gabe, Blayne Alexander with NBC News. Following up very quickly on Justin's question. Two members of the board of elections, the State Board of Elections have called on the Secretary of State's office to investigate that phone call. How is the secretary's office responding? Is there any plan to investigate, or will you block that investigation in any way?

STERLING: I'm not aware of any discussions specifically about that yet, but I'm sure it will be taken under advisement.

ALEXANDER: And I'll ask you very quickly about the secretary's desire to have that phone call recorded. Why did he want that call recorded? Was he concerned about anything improper being said or that he may need to release it later?

STERLING: I think given the environment we're in right now, and the political situation that we're in, and the history of the president, knowing that he sometimes doesn't necessarily characterize things as they might have actually occurred, it was out of an abundance of caution. But I'm sure many people -- I'm sure, the president's side recorded it too, so they might have been the ones that leaked part of that as well. ALEXANDER: Thank you.

MATT FINN, FOX NEWS NATIONAL: Matt Finn with Fox News National. How do you interpret the President asking the Secretary of State to, quote, find votes on that phone call? Is it fair to say the President was asking the Secretary of State to fraudulently find or flip votes?

STERLING: I don't know if he was trying to fraudulently find the votes, but things we have certified this election, say there are no more votes to find. That we'll continue investigations, so has an election challenge.

And on of the things they were discussion on that phone call was they have sued the state of Georgia and the Secretary of State. There are rules of evidence to follow once you do that.

Trying to go outside of that is an issue, and I believe sent --- our lawyers have sent their lawyers a letter saying, if you want to dismiss your challenge, you're more than happy to share this data to show that your data is incorrect and you have in fact lost the state of Georgia.

FINN: The Bureau of Investigation says there's an unprecedented number of threats statewide. Are you aware of any of those types of threats?

STERLING: I'm sorry -- I didn't -- the unprecedented number of threats, what?

FINN: The Bureau of Investigation says there is an unprecedented number of threats that have come in statewide regarding the election. We're not sure the nature of those threats. Are you aware of what type of threat's you guys --?

STERLING: We are aware of some but we're trying to not discuss in too much detail about that while they try to investigate and find out what the actual nature of those threats may be.

KONSTANTIN TOROPIN, CNN NEWS EDITOR, NATIONAL DESK: Hey, Gabe, Konstantin Toropin with CNN. So this is now the second sort of conversation that the Secretary of State that has been reported out on this topic, first it was Lindsey Graham earlier in November and now the president. Has the Secretary of State's office been contacted by any other members of the Trump administration or GOP officials?

STERLING: Well, I mean our office is contacted by Democrats, Republicans-elect pretty consistently to discuss election issues, so yes, that has occurred. Specifically, it's a little bit of a broad question, I think, but we get contacted by members of the administration, we get contacted by Democrats, we get contacted by Republicans.

TOROPIN: Have you been contacted by -- on the topic of some of these conspiracy theories that you've outlined today?

STERLING: No, I mean no more than my normal of having to explain the ridiculousness of these pieces of disinformation. So thank you all very much.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Excuse me, the Secretary of State was asked by a federal judge to meet with Black Voters Matter to return wrongly purged voters back to the voting rolls?

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: All right, that was pretty extraordinary. Gabriel Sterling, lifelong Republican, election official there in Georgia. He is ticked off. But I think more than anything, you heard a lot of sighs. He is exasperated because he is having to stand there on the eve of these monumental Senate elections tomorrow in Georgia and have to go line by line by line -- and man, that was a long list -- debunking the president's conspiracy theories when it comes to the vote totals there in Georgia.

Dana Bash, Doug Heye, Daniel Dale, you all join me here in all of this and first of all that he could rattle all of that off, Dana, off the top of his head, tells me he's doing an extraordinary job, but what did you make of what we just saw?

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, as you said, exasperated, but, you know, the fact that one of the most important election officials in a state where they're going to have two runoff elections that will determine the balance of power here in Washington has to stand for more than a half and hour and not just rattle off the facts as he sees them as he knows them but also to beg

people to vote. To beg people to not work against themselves, is effectively what he said. He used different phrasing, but it is remarkable.

Because he knows what is going on, on the ground in Georgia. He hears -- as he said, he has friends who he's known for 20 years telling him that they might not vote because they don't believe that the election system is worthy of it.

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And, you know, he has to even try to reason with them to say, even if you believe that, which you shouldn't, here is why you should vote, because, you know, you need to have your voice heard.

And that's a remarkable thing, and you really do have kind of a David and Goliath situation here in that the president has the largest, the biggest, the most powerful megaphone and microphone when it comes to the misinformation, the disinformation, the lies that he is telling that we just heard Mr. Sterling try to debunk.

And here you have a local election official using the little platform that he has in the short time that he has much of a megaphone to try to do right by it. That was one of the reasons it was extraordinary.

BALDWIN: It was. Daniel and Doug, let me come to you in just a second, but let's go into that room to our correspondent there, Diane Gallagher, who was in there. And Diane, we were just saying, to see this local election official for over half an hour. I mean I don't know if you were able to sneak a peek at his laundry list, you know, all the conspiracy theories that the president has put out there, and he has to spend this time the day before the election going through it all. Tell me what you took away from that.

DIANE GALLAGHER, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Brooke, and, you know, he kind of -- I would say he went over each one of those conspiracy theories trying to debunk them with persistence. But I think Dana used the word exasperation, and that's what I would us to describe this as well

Gabriel Sterling said at one point that it felt like Groundhog's Day because yet again he was having to come out and debunk conspiracy theories that are being peddled by powerful people including ostensibly the most powerful person in the country, if not the world, the president of the United States.

What I found most interesting was as he was going through these, Gabriel Sterling, who is a Republican, you could tell that he is concerned about tomorrow. Those runoff Senate elections here in Georgia saying that claims made by the president and by his supporters potentially could be suppressing the vote here in Georgia, specifically the vote that Gabriel Sterling is concerned with, the Republican vote.

He literally opened this up, begging people to go out and vote to prove the theories wrong, essentially, almost baiting them. Hey, go out, vote, make sure that what they're saying isn't true. Prove them wrong because there is legitimate fear in his voice that potentially the president's conspiracy theories could hurt both candidates, candidate Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, in those Senate runoffs.

We already know that more than 3 million votes have been cast and we know they Democrats are very excited by the number of registered Democrats that have turned out to vote in early voting both by mail and in person.

And to see a Republican official come out here and take down conspiracy theories that were not just peddled on the phone by the president, but they've peddled through ads, he has been skewing these things on Twitter as he went through his Twitter account and go through one by one and explicitly talk about what his office has done to try and investigate those claims and why they are not true.

And it really was -- you could sense the exasperation in his voice, but it really was remarkable to sit here and watch him go through that and just see this frustration coming through from this election official who was concerned about how the Republican president might be screwing over Republicans in this state and potentially control of the U.S. Senate for them.

BALDWIN: Yes, I want to get to that point, Diane. Thank you so much. Doug Heye, to you. You know, that yes, exasperated, also I would add unflinching from Mr. Sterling and he kept saying, you know, don't self-suppress your vote. But to Dianne's point, to Dana's point now to you, in terms of the vote itself. Let me read you this one quote, and I want your two cents on all of this. This is from a Georgia Republican to one of our CNN folks on the ground there.

Quote, no one has any rational reason to believe it, tomorrow the voting will go well. The likelihood of a total complete absolute "shit show" -- pardon my French, this is a direct quote -- is off the charts. If disaster is avoided, it will be sheer, dumb luck.

You heard Mr. Sterling there. He's obviously concerned about the vote itself as a Republican. What say you?

DOUG HEYE, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I'm terrified about what could happen, and in part because Republicans just speaking purely political here, Republicans should win these races tomorrow. The lay of the land typically favors Republicans. They've improved over the past seven out of eight special elections going back to Paul Coverdell in 1992, one that I worked on.

Mitch McConnell and the NRSC have put over a $100 million in, they've left it all on field. But Donald Trump represents a wrecking ball that's going to knock down the stadium where the games' being played for his own wins dividing Republicans amongst themselves.

And if Loeffler and Perdue lose, Donald Trump's not going to be loyal to them. We know he's more likely to call them losers and everything that goes along with that, because Donald Trump doesn't give points, he only takes them away one at a time.

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And there's this question of conservatism, where, what does it mean to be conservative right now? And there is a joke that conservatives say, that you stand the thwart of history and say stop. That's exactly what we saw right now. It was the grace under pressure that Earnest Hemingway called courage. It was the most heroic and maybe patriotic thing I think I've ever seen on television. It's powerful.

BALDWIN: Doug, thank you for that, and I'm just sitting here wondering about the law. Elliott Williams, as a lawyer, just going back to the phone call in and of itself, between Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State there in Georgia and the president, did anything that the president does break the law, either on the federal level or state?

ELLIOTT WILLIAMS, FORMER DEPUTY ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL: Look, you can probably open up an investigation. It might be hard to convict the president of a crime here because, you know, fraud, election fraud crimes are just hard to establish.

Because what you would have to establish is that the president knew he was lying and knew -- that the president was lying that he knew he was encouraging a person to violate election law. And the tricky thing is, if he genuinely -- this is the president being undone by his own incompetence and delusion. If the President truly believes that he won the election and feels that there are these 11,000 votes out there, he's not actually asking someone to commit an act of fraud because he's asking someone to certify a lawful election.

But here's the problem. We get hung up with this president all the time on, is it a crime or is it not? And that's not the right question to ask. These are moral failures of the president.

BALDWIN: yes.

WILLIAMS: We saw moral failures through the course of the president's entire term in office. Look, going back to the Mueller investigation where there were 11 instances of misconduct, four of which you could charge as crimes. OK, fine, but there's still seven things that he did that are moral rungs not befitting a president of the United States. And just because you might not be able to charge it as a crime or convict it as a crime, that doesn't it mean it's something that president ought to be doing.

BALDWIN: Moral discretions of the abuse of power there in the Oval Office, trying to, you know, exert influence over this official there in Georgia.

Daniel Dale, you know, as I was listening to Mr. Sterling there, I know you're our resident fact checker. But you can basically take the day off because I think he did a lot of your job for you, you know, and listening to him go line by line. And I know you also went line by line through that phone call between the secretary of state and the president. What would you like to add?

DANIEL DALE, CNN REPORTER: I'd just add that nothing the president is saying about the election is true. You know, I've said over and over on CNN that the president is a serial liar, but he usually sprinkles in some truth amid the lies.

With election since election night, it has been all nonsense. That's true about Georgia, it's true about Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona. He's just spouting conspiracy theories, deception, either deliberately or because his brain has been captured by weird people on the internet, I don't know.

But, you know, the media likes to describe this stuff as a debate, as a feud. There's simply no two sides here, on one side, we have facts, and one side we have lies -- Brooke.

BALDWIN: Let's stay within the realm of fact and reality. Hopefully, Georgians will, hopefully members of Congress will come Wednesday. Thank you all so much for now for going through that just remarkable bit of television from Gabriel Sterling there in Georgia.

Coming up next here on CNN, while the president continues on his attacks against the election, the country is suffering. New questions today about how the COVID vaccine is being rolled out. You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

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BALDWIN: Breaking news out of England. The Prime Minister Boris Johnson just announced the country is under a national lockdown. This comes as cases surge. A new variant of the virus and a warning from the National Health Service that hospitals are at risk of becoming overwhelmed.

Here in the U.S., more than 15 million vaccines have been distributed. But only little over 4 million have actually been administered.

So on that point with me now, Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath, she is a molecular immunologist and the president and CEO of Biotechnology Innovation Organization. So Dr. McMurry-Heath, welcome as always. You know, and as I pointed out, the problem right now isn't that we don't have enough vaccines, it's that we are not administering them fast enough. How does the U.S. change that?

DR. MICHELLE MCMURRY-HEATH, PRESIDENT AND CEO, BIOTECHNOLOGY INNOVATION ORGANIZATION: Well, we're a minute late, a dollar short. It's really, really very sad. We had a national vaccine plan, a plan to get a vaccine, but we've never had a national vaccination plan. And you know, academics and clinical providers have been clear for the last three or four months that it was very important to make sure that we not just develop the vaccine, that figure out how to get the shots in arms.

And the U.S. is falling quickly behind in this race to vaccinate, and it is not just a race against other countries, it is a race against the spread of the virus itself.

BALDWIN: So one possible solution and again to your point about vaccines and vaccinations, I'm not quite sure how much it helps it, but the head of Operation Warp Speed says that the U.S. is considering giving half doses of the Moderna vaccine, meaning still two doses but half doses each. Does that make sense to you and are half doses -- that was a sigh, is this effective?

DR. MCMURRY-HEATH: They're not the same thing, let's say that. And of course they may well be effective, but the point is we don't yet know. We have not done clinical trials to know that they're as effective as the full dose of the vaccine or that spacing the vaccine doses more than they were spaced in original clinical trials that were presented to the Food and Drug Administration will be effective. We have not tested it.

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So while we're very open to seeing how we can be flexible and doing the studies to know for sure, at this point what we know is that the original doses work in the original schedule.

BALDWIN: Got it. We need more data, we need the science behind it and we also need just getting the shots in arms, period. Dr. McMurry- Heath, thank you so, so much. We'll talk again.

President Trump and President-elect Biden both in Georgia ahead of the critical Senate runoff elections. Special live coverage continues next.

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