ATLANTA — Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger shot down 2020 election conspiracy theories during a town hall call Thursday for District 8 residents in South Georgia.

Despite claims of election fraud, falsely suggesting the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, Raffensperger assured callers all votes were counted and recounted several times in the 2020 election — and the four people who cast ballots for dead people will be prosecuted.

“It was alleged that there was 10,315 dead people that voted in Georgia,” Raffesnperger said. “I wrote a letter to Congress on Jan. 6, and I said there’s two that we found. Since that time we found two more. Only four dead people voted in the state of Georgia. And so those people that assumed those identities will be brought before the state election board for prosecution and sent over to the Attorney General’s Office.”

A new death tracking system, Electronic Registration Information Center — which is used by more than 30 states— has been fully deployed in Georgia this year, he said.

After an audit and two recounts — including a hand recount — of more than 5 million ballots cast during the November 2020 elections, an estimated 28,000 Georgians skipped voting in the Presidential race, but voted in other races on the same ballots, Raffensperger said.

“That audit that we did, the hand recount, on all 5 million ballots proved two things. One is the accuracy of the machine, two is that the machines did not flip the votes and, also the results were what they were, that President Trump did come up short,” Raffesnperger said.

Following the controversial election, Georgia lawmakers passed the Republican-led Voter Integrity Act this year. Several other Republican states have passed or are deliberating similar legislation.

“With the continued onslaught of Republican-led anti-voter efforts in Georgia and states across the country, our work protecting the freedom to vote could not be more urgent during this critical time for our nation and democracy,” said Cianti Stewart-Reid, new executive director of Fair Fight Action, a national voting rights organization founded by Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

While Raffensperger and GOP supporters of the new voting laws argue the legislation increases ballot security and voter access, Abrams, fellow Democrats and voting rights activists push back hard, saying the laws amount to voter suppression, disproportionately affecting voters of color and underrepresented communities.

Raffensperger said during the town hall Thursday the law increases the early voting period in all counties to three weeks, adds two mandatory Saturday voting days, mandates absentee ballot drop boxes in all counties and aims to reduce voter wait times to less than an hour.

“And if [the wait is longer than an hour], in the next election you have to bust the precinct in half or add additional equipment,” Raffensperger said. “We also have another accountability measure. The state election board now can really do a review and have a measure that if a county habitually and continually fails like Fulton County has since 1993, we now have the ability to come in and actually replace that election board.”

A state monitor for Fulton County’s elections noted, however, there was no illegality or ballot stuffing, but said he did observe “gross disorganization and gross mismanagement.”

“What that is, it’s just a breeding ground for conspiracy theories,” he said. A state election review panel — comprised of a Republican, Democrat and the state’s general counsel — in the event of irregularities can now review the county election operations to make recommendations to the state elections board and General Assembly to determine fixes.

The new law also requires voters to submit a copy of an ID to get an absentee ballot, and prevents people from passing out water and snacks to those waiting in voting lines, an act that could be viewed as “politicking” at the polls, he said.

On the topic of absentee ballots, one caller during Raffensperger’s town hall speculated that the state entered into a settlement agreement with voting rights activist, and now gubernatorial candidate, Abrams. Raffensperger said the agreement, “Signature Match Settlement Agreement,” was with the Georgia Democratic Party.

“This agreement made sure that our signature matching requirements were in place both at the absentee ballot application phase and at the absentee ballot return stage when the voters sent their ballots back into the counties,” he said. “Activists groups have been suing us to eliminate signature matching and we beat that back. I got those activists and their lawyers suing us to agree to release Georgia of any and all claims about signature matching, which meant that they couldn’t come back later and sue us if they didn’t like the results of the 2020 election.”

The 30-minute town hall also fielded a question from South Georgians pertaining to a $5 million grant Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg made to Georgia for its elections, purportedly used in blue-leaning counties to increase Democratic voter turnout. However, Raffesnperger said those funds were instead used statewide to push back on election disinformation and promote the state’s Voter Fraud Hotline (877-725-9797) via advertisements.