Georgia’s top election official says he believes Republicans’ claims that they doubt the integrity of the vote in November’s presidential election will “really hurt” their party’s chances in the election.

In an interview with NewsNation on Sunday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defended the election process he oversees as record numbers of early votes were cast in recent days. His comments came after Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia – Raffensperger’s Republican colleague – posted claims on X that a voting machine misprinted a voter’s selection to the detriment of her party.

Raffensperger, who took office in 2019, said that “spreading stories like this” will “really harm our turnout on our side.”

“I’m a conservative Republican so I don’t know why they’re doing this, it’s self-defeating,” Raffensperger added. “You know, you can trust the results.”

Georgia, a battleground state, has been at the center of Republicans’ baseless claims of voter fraud. During the 2020 election, after Joe Biden narrowly won Georgia and took the presidency from Donald Trump, Raffensperger announced a recount of ballots. This recount confirmed that Biden had won the election.

Since then, legal and political battles have put the state at the center of Trump’s bid to return to the White House in a contest against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Recent court rulings in Georgia have pushed back on Republican attempts to change the way the state runs its elections.

The Georgia State Election Board, a relatively opaque five-member panel made up mostly of pro-Trump Republicans, has adopted a set of rules that would significantly change the way the state handles its political elections. The most controversial proposal sought to require poll workers to count ballots by hand on election night.

Still, Georgia judges refused to implement those changes after Raffensperger warned that they could lead to disruptions in the certification of the election, confusion and delays. The Republican Party of Georgia has filed an appeal.

More than a million voters have already cast their ballots in Georgia, cementing its status as a swing state in the race between Harris and Trump.

After the 2020 election, Republicans close to Trump lied that their candidate lost to Biden due to voter fraud. The frenzy over these lies culminated in the attack by Trump supporters on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. At one point, Raffensperger received a call directly from Trump pressuring him to “get” enough votes for him to Preventing Biden from winning Georgia, even though the secretary of state rebuffed him.

Prosecutors in the US state of Georgia later filed criminal charges against Trump over his attempts to overturn the results of the presidential election there. This is all part of the many legal problems the former president faced while running for the White House again.

In an interview with The New York Times in early October, Trump’s vice president JD Vance refused to answer whether the former president lost the 2020 election. Vance later clarified that he did not believe Trump lost the 2020 race, saying: “So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not in the words I would use.”

Raffensperger claimed Sunday that Georgia is “ranked number one” for election integrity by organizations on both sides of the political spectrum.

“It just shows that we’re doing the right thing,” Raffensperger said. “Voters trust the process we have in Georgia. It’s easy to vote. It’s hard to cheat.”