Brad Raffensperger is walking a fine line.
At a Rotary Club meeting in a church south of Atlanta, the Georgia Secretary of State wants to assure any "hardcore Republicans" that he hasn't "gone to the dark side".
What he means by that is the Democratic side of politics.
Raffensperger is the Republican who pushed back when Donald Trump famously called him in January 2021 and said he wanted to "find "11,780 votes" in Georgia.
That would have given Trump one more vote than Joe Biden, who flipped the state in the 2020 presidential election from Republican to Democrat.
Raffensperger's stance alienated the MAGA wing of his own party and led to threats against him and his family.
But he stood firm and got re-elected as secretary of state. He has since overseen a series of voting reforms that he argues should strengthen trust in the electoral system and leave less room for conspiracy theories to flourish.
The changes include more restrictions on the locations and opening hours of absentee ballot boxes. Photo identification is now required for all forms of voting, and it's illegal to give food or water to anyone waiting in line to vote.
Democrats decried the changes as an assault on democracy.
Raffensperger argues they benefit all Georgians.
"I want to really give you great confidence in Georgia, because we have a great story to tell," he tells the assembled Rotarians.
But the actions of the Republican-dominated state election board are threatening to undermine those assurances.
Taking on Trump's 'pitbulls'
The board, which oversees and regulates elections in Georgia, has been making some other changes.
The five-member board has been overhauled by Republicans in Georgia's state legislature. Raffensperger, its previous chairman, was removed from it. Three other Republicans have effectively been put in control.
They have set about pushing through a series of new rules empowering local officials to investigate ballot counts at their own discretion.
Raffensperger describes those new rules as "a mess".
"They're talking about opening up those ballot boxes at the local precincts, instead of bringing back to the headquarters in a secured box," the secretary of state told the ABC on the sidelines of the Rotary event.
Marc Elias, a top election lawyer for the Democrats, told a podcast that the rules were akin "to saying at a football game that we're going to give the scoreboard operator the opportunity to investigate for themselves whether a touchdown was scored".
The national and state Democratic parties have launched legal action demanding the rules be overturned.
Raffensperger appears to agree with them, even if he won't say so outright.
"I do not support the rules as they are," he says.
At a recent rally in Georgia, Trump called out the board's Republican members by name and called them "pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory".
One of the so-called pitbulls is Janelle King, a former deputy director of the state Republican Party who was appointed to the board earlier this year.
"President Trump gets excited, he says a lot of things," she told the ABC.
"We get attacked 24/7, all day long, so I welcome positive comments."
King insists she is not a MAGA extremist and says she's had no conversations with Trump or his team about the rule changes.
She dismisses concerns they will lead to delays in certifying the vote.
"Why do we have to overturn a rule that gives election officials more confidence in their decisions?" she says.
"These are the things that strengthen our elections."
But Raffensperger fears they are "really going to jam up the works".
"When you have too much time, it's a great friend to conspiracy theories," he says.
'Out of its way to basically rig the election'
Democratic state senator Nabilah Islam Parkes describes the board's new rules as "unethical" and "illegal".
She's written to Georgia's Republican Governor Brian Kemp asking him to remove the board members.
"I'm worried that the state election board is going out of its way to basically rig the election for this November 5," Senator Islam Parkes said.
"Last time around ... Donald Trump tried to overthrow our votes, and now him and his MAGA allies are doing similar things at the state election board."
Kemp asked his attorney-general, Chris Carr, to determine whether he was obliged to open an investigation into the board's activities.
Carr found he wasn't, leading Senator Islam Parkes to accuse him of "providing cover for the MAGA election board members".
Critics of the state election board are urging voters to keep pressuring Kemp to take action.
Back in 2020, Kemp also pushed back on Trump's attempts to challenge the outcome of the election, leading to a public falling out.
Recently there seems to have been a thaw in relations and, so far at least, Kemp has given no signal he's prepared to intervene in the dispute about the board's actions.
Battle for the 'Black vote'
The latest polls indicate another very close race in Georgia, with Trump neck and neck with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
The Republicans think they have a good chance of taking back the traditionally conservative state and Trump is making overtures to African Americans who make up one third of Georgia's population.
It's here in Georgia that the former president was booked last year on criminal charges related to his alleged efforts to overturn the results in the state of the 2020 election.
The case is currently on hold pending appeals, but Trump is making hay with the mugshot he got at the local jail.
"The mugshot, we've all seen the mugshot, but you know who's embraced it more than anyone else? The Black population," the former president said earlier this year.
"It's incredible."
Azad Ahmadi, an Atlanta businessman and committee chair on Georgia's Black Republican Council, describes that comment as "awkward". "But I get it," he says.
"It's not a matter of Black men identifying with being criminals.
"This is about Black men feeling like they've been marginalised, and he's one of the few white men in America that can relate to that."
African Americans have traditionally been part of the Democrats' core constituency.
In 2020 Joe Biden secured 92 per cent of the Black vote nationwide.
Even a small shift in voting patterns could have seismic consequences.
Azad, a 41-year-old army veteran, said he realised before the 2016 election that the Republican Party was more aligned with his "core values" than the Democratic Party.
He was also drawn to Trump's background as a property tycoon.
"I decided that one of the things that this country needed was a businessman, and so that was very appealing to me at the time."
For a while Azad says he kept his thoughts to himself.
He jokes that, even in 2020, when he mentioned his support for Trump at his barber shop, he thought he was going to have to shoot his way out of there.
Now, he says, the conversation is more open.
Maurice Combs doesn't buy that.
The Atlanta master barber says Trump's claims that Black men relate to his mugshot are "like a slap to the face".
"Because he's privileged," says Maurice. "I got friends that can't vote because they're convicted of a felony and he can run for president."
Maurice began sweeping floors in a barber shop as a teenager, and he's been working in the profession for three decades.
The 51-year-old is not convinced more Black men will vote for Trump this time around.
"I don't know what Black men he talking about. Might be the guys around him that say yes to everything he say."
Maurice doesn't think too highly of politicians in general, but says he will be voting for Kamala Harris.
"In America, we always have to go for the lesser of two evils, and I have to do what I think is going to be better for my people in the long run."
But Harris can't rely on the support of Black voters, even here in the Deep South.
Azad Ahmadi's fiancée, 34-year-old Alexandra Knoten, thinks that for the first time in her life she'll back a Republican presidential candidate.
"Your initial thought is, wow there's an African-American woman in the position to be president.
"And then that facade kind of went out the window. It's like, where has she been the whole presidency when Biden was here? I mean, it's like she was a ghost."
When she was growing up in Louisiana, Alexandra said she just accepted that everybody around her voted Democratic.
That's just the way it was.
"It's kind of like, your grandmother is a Democrat, your mother's a Democrat, so you're automatically a Democrat."
Some of her relatives still can't believe she's "really gonna vote for Trump".
But the sales and events manager says she also felt better off under Trump than Biden.
"I think my monthly cost in gas is about almost $1,000 or more a month, and I didn't have that issue when Trump was in office."
A brewing political storm
Georgia's secretary of state is having people from his office drop in on voting offices across Georgia to test their electronic election systems, sometimes with the media in tow.
"We want everyone to understand that we have fair, secure, accurate elections here in Georgia," Raffensperger tells a group which includes the ABC and crews from the US, UK and Germany.
The company whose voting machines Georgia uses, Dominion, settled a defamation case against cable news giant Fox last year for $US787.5 million ($1.17 billion).
Dominion sued Fox News and Fox Corporation over the airing of conspiracy theories involving the machines.
Raffensperger assures the assembled media that the test at the Spalding County offices has confirmed everything is working perfectly.
He wants to prevent a repeat of the chaos that followed the last vote.
After he resisted Trump's attempts to find him more votes in 2020, Raffensperger says he was doxed.
In 2022, he told a congressional committee that threatening messages his wife received were often sexualised and were "disgusting".
Raffensperger also testified that someone broke into the home of his widowed daughter-in-law and her two children. (Raffensperger's son died in 2018 of a fentanyl overdose.)
"We were very concerned about her safety also."
Asked at the time why he didn't just quit and walk away, he said he "had to be faithful to the constitution".
"I think sometimes moments require you to stand up and just take the shots."
If one of those moments arises again, Raffensperger says he won't hesitate to do what he thinks is right.
"I'm always prepared to follow the law and follow the constitution," he told the ABC.
"I'll do my job."
— with Phoebe Hosier in Washington DC
