A group of Republicans has united to defend the legitimacy of US elections and those who run them

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May 4th, 2024

FILE - Rusty Bowers, Arizona state House Speaker, from left, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State, and Gabe Sterling, COO for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, attend a hearing investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol at the Capitol in Washington, June 21, 2022. With six months to go before the presidential election, concerns are running high among election officials that public distrust of voting and ballot counting persists. Sterling is part of an effort that seeks to bring together Republican officials who are willing to defend the country's election systems. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

It was Election Day last November, and one of Georgia’s top election officials saw that reports of a voting machine problem in an eastern Pennsylvania county were gaining traction online.

So Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who had defended the 2020 election in Georgia amid an onslaught of threats, posted a message to his nearly 71,000 followers on the social platform X explaining what had happened and saying that all votes would be counted correctly.

He faced immediate criticism from one commenter about why he was weighing in on another state’s election while other responses reiterated false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

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