An image shared on Facebook claims Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has a brother named Ron who works for the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei.

Screenshot/Facebook

Verdict: False

Brad Raffensperger and the Ron Raffensperger pictured are not brothers. While Brad Raffensperger does have one brother, his name is not Ron, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office confirmed.

Fact Check: 

The post features photos of two people: Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state for Georgia, and Ron Raffensperger, the chief technology officer of Huawei Enterprise Storage Solutions. It uses a yellow arrow to falsely claim the two men pictured are brothers, seemingly in an attempt to suggest a relationship between the Georgia secretary of state and Huawei, a Chinese company that, according to Reuters, was placed on the U.S.’s entity list due to national security concerns in May 2019.

Brad Raffensperger has three sisters and a brother, none of whom is named Ron, according to a 2018 family obituary and Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB). The Georgia Secretary of State’s office confirmed to Check Your Fact in a text message that Brad Raffensperger does not have a brother named Ron. Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs also told CNN that “there are no relatives who work for China or are affiliated with China.” (RELATED: Does This Image Show Two Georgia State Senators Found Counting Ballots?)

The inaccurate claim about Brad Raffensperger and Ron Raffensperger being brothers appears to have stemmed from them coincidentally having the same last name. Gateway Pundit published an now-unavailable article making the false claim on Dec. 22. President Donald Trump on Dec. 29 also tweeted a similar claim, writing, “Now it turns out that Brad R’s brother works for China.”

Following Trump’s tweet, some news outlets and journalists initially erroneously reported that Brad Raffensperger didn’t have a brother at all. Newsweek and The Daily Beast, for instance, later updated their articles, and journalists such as CNN’s Daniel Dale and GPB’s Stephen Fowler also made clarifications on Twitter.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Georgia’s Secretary of State does have a brother – who is a private citizen and not discussed much. He’s also got sisters. None of them are named Ron, work for China or have to do with voting machine vendors.

More details below. #gapolhttps://t.co/ucUmXJ7xCj

— stephen fowler covers Georgia’s election! (@stphnfwlr) December 30, 2020

“IMPORTANT UPDATE: Georgia’s Secretary of State does have a brother – who is a private citizen and not discussed much,” Fowler tweeted. “He’s also got sisters. None of them are named Ron, work for China or have to do with voting machine vendors.”

The inaccurate claim about Brad Raffensperger’s brother has circulated on social media ahead of the two Senate runoff elections in Georgia.

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