Gabriel Sterling, known for defending Georgia's 2020 election results, is running for the state's secretary of state

FILE - Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State, answers journalists' questions, Nov. 16, 2022, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Ben Gray, File)

ATLANTA (AP) — A former top elections official who made a name for himself defending Georgia's 2020 presidential election tally against threats from supporters of President Donald Trump is now running to be the state's elections chief.

Republican Gabriel Sterling, 54, filed paperwork Tuesday to run for secretary of state and announced his candidacy Thursday.

“Georgia elections are the safest in the nation and I will fight every day to keep it that way,” Sterling said in a statement.

Sterling was for six years the right-hand man of Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger until resigning recently. Trump famously asked Raffensperger in a telephone call to help “find” enough votes to overturn the Republican's loss in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden.

Sterling’s entry is the clearest sign yet that Raffensperger will be seeking another office in 2026, possibly governor.

Even before the January 2021 call, Sterling, who had overseen the implementation of a new voting system, had assumed a high profile.

He repeatedly debunked claims of fraud that Trump and his supporters blamed on Dominion Voting Systems machines. In what started as a routine news conference in December 2020 to provide an update on a recount requested by Trump, Sterling called on Trump to do more to end threats of violence against election workers. He cited the case of a contractor for Dominion who received death threats.

"What you don't have the ability to do, and you need to step up and say this, is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence," Sterling said in remarks directed at Trump. “Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed."

By then, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was looking into threats against Raffensperger and Sterling, and the homes of both men were under police guard. Both would later be escorted out of the Georgia Capitol by state troopers on Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the U.S. Capitol siege, as about 100 protesters gathered outside, some armed with long guns.

Sterling joins a race where the issue of Georgia's administration of the 2020 elections has hardly gone away.

Republicans Kelvin King and state Rep. Tim Fleming are already in the race. King, a former U.S. Senate candidate, has been appealing to Trump supporters. He entered the race in July with a not-so-veiled attack on Sterling, saying that “government employees who attack political candidates or supporters — of either party — will be held accountable and terminated. We’ve seen unprofessional conduct, with press conferences aimed at attacking the president and concerned citizens.”

His wife, Janelle King, is a member of the State Elections Board that saw some key actions overturned by the state Supreme Court.

Fleming heads a committee studying Georgia's election system. He cowrote a letter this week urging Raffensperger to set up a trial of hand-marked paper ballots, a key demand of Republican activists who have been agitating against Georgia's machine-marked ballots since 2020. Raffensperger, so scorned that June's state GOP convention purported to ban him from running for office again as a Republican, quickly responded that such a trial would be illegal.

The only Democrat running for secretary of state thus far is little-known Adrian Consonery Jr.

The key question for Sterling will be whether Trump supporters who blame Sterling and Raffensperger for Trump's 2020 loss will dominate the primary or whether Sterling can attract other voters. Georgia doesn't register voters by party, meaning independents or even people who normally vote as Democrats can participate in a Republican primary.

Sterling is a lifelong Republican who was a city council member in suburban Sandy Springs before Raffensperger hired him to oversee the rollout of the Dominion system before the 2020 election.