Brad Raffensperger resisted Trump’s call to overturn the presidential election result and is now facing his ire.

He was referring to the infamous 2 January 2021 call from Donald Trump in which the president asked Raffensperger to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Raffensperger, who oversaw three recounts of the presidential vote, all of which affirmed Joe Biden’s victory, refused the request, enraging Trump.

He wants to replace him with Jody Hice, a Republican congressman who has said the election was stolen and joined efforts to overturn it.

It’s one of several races across the country in which Trump is seeking to install allies in important election administration positions in which they could throw out the results of a future election.

It could determine whether the person overseeing the next presidential election in Georgia is someone who prevented an election from being overturned or someone who tried to overturn the last one.

“All eyes should be on this race between Raffensperger and Hice,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action, which is tracking election deniers running for office across the country.

She noted all three officials who refused to overturn the election in 2020 – the governor, attorney general and secretary of state – are up for re-election.

Nsé Ufot, CEO of the non-partisan New Georgia Project, which works on voter registration in the state, said Raffensperger had received national praise for not overturning the election, “as if that alone is the litmus test as to whether someone is a vote suppressor or not”.

“He is looking for a low-cost symbolic gesture that I think he hopes will restore his conservative bona fides among people who questioned them because he didn’t overturn the results of the 2020 election,” she said.

Raffensperger has refused to back down from his defense of the 2020 election, essentially betting that voters will re-elect him for doing his job and standing up to Trump, even if they support the former president.

At the event in Washington, Raffensperger methodically laid out his case for upholding the results of the 2020 election to the small crowd (there was a competing baseball game and awards dinner that night).

He relied on statistics: 28,000 Georgia voters skipped the presidential election but voted down ballot, Raffensperger said, repeating a statistic he frequently mentions on the campaign trail.

Republican members of Congress got 33,000 more votes in Georgia than Trump did, he said.

When Trump said thousands of dead people voted in 2020, Raffensperger’s office investigated and found just four.

Then Trump said more than 2,000 felons voted in the 2020 election.

Trump then said 2,423 non-registered voters cast a ballot in 2020.

Then Trump started saying machines were flipping votes and Raffensperger did a hand recount of all 5m ballots cast in the state and found the results were essentially the same.

Kenneth Studdard, 56, who owns Dogwood Books in Rome, also said he liked Trump, and said he would probably vote for Raffensperger, though he wasn’t following the race too closely yet.

Hice repeated a number of lies about the 2020 election and said that Raffensperger created so-called ballot harvesting in Georgia (Raffensperger supported a 2019 law that outlawed third-party collection of mail-in ballots).

He claimed Raffensperger had made a deal with Stacey Abrams to weaken signature matching standards in the state (a 2020 court settlement required that multiple election officials check a signature before it was rejected and notify the voter before rejecting it).

Hice also criticised Raffensperger for sending out mail-in ballot applications during the election (Raffensperger sent out mail-in ballot applications to all Georgia voters during the state’s 2020 primary, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, but did not do so during the general election).

After the debate, Hice told a small gaggle of reporters that nothing would convince him the 2020 election results were accurate.

If elected secretary of state, it could be Hice on the other end the next time Trump, or another politician, calls with a request to find votes.

Hice didn’t answer how he would handle such a request, but said he didn’t see anything wrong with it in 2020.

They said they were unconvinced Trump lost the 2020 election in Georgia because they had seen the large crowds of people that came to see him when he visited the state.

Even though he has received an onslaught of death threats and harassment since the 2020 election, Raffensperger doesn’t really seem to have given much thought to the possibility of not running again