© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Come November 5, American voters will not just be choosing a new President. At the federal level, 34 Senate seats and 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs. Then there are state and local elections — eleven governors and more than 5,800 state legislators will also be elected.
Ashwin Ramaswami, an Indian American Democrat who only just made the age requirement for the election by turning 25 in May, is running in Georgia’s Senate District 48. Although the seat he is contesting from has traditionally voted Republican, the debutant is putting up a tough fight against Republican Georgia state Senator Shawn Still, one of the many people indicted alongside former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election interference case.
Born to Indian immigrant parents from Tamil Nadu, Ramaswami grew up in Johns Creek — a wealthy suburb in Atlanta that is home to many Indian American immigrants, mostly in the tech industry.
Ramaswami studied Computer Science at Stanford, then went to Georgetown University for a Law Degree. His Linkedin profile and campaign website show he has worked primarily in the cybersecurity and tech policy space. In 2017, he began “working with his first technology startup around healthcare regulation”.
While he was at Stanford, he worked with Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic venture founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt that funds science and technology projects, researching on securing open source software, which formed the basis of a Bill in the American Congress.
Ramaswami also taught classes for high schoolers about Hindu philosophy and “helped raise $100K to establish an endowment for Dharmic programs (for students from Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and other traditions)” while he was at Georgetown.
Between 2020 and 2023, Ramaswami was with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the “operational lead for federal cybersecurity and the national coordinator for critical infrastructure security and resilience”, working to “build a program that helped local election officials protect their websites from malicious attacks,” NBC News reported.
In 2023, while Ramaswami was still in Law School, Still was charged with illegally attempting to overturn the 2020 Presidential election.
After Biden won the election, Trump had repeatedly claimed that the election was “stolen”, and that he had won instead. The state of Georgia, which Trump lost narrowly, frequently featured in his claims. Trump also allegedly made calls to top Georgia officials, including Governor Brian Kemp, “to urge them to find a way to reverse his loss in the state”, according to a report by the Associated Press.
Still was among the “16 Georgia Republicans who signed a certificate falsely stating that Trump had won the state and declaring themselves the state’s ‘duly elected and qualified’ electors,” the AP reported. However, this did not stop him from getting elected to the Georgia state Senate in November 2022 — while under investigation.
The case against Still has been the primary focus of Ramaswami’s campaign. “It is not just hackers hacking into our systems” but “politicians falsely claiming that the election is rigged when it’s not,” Ramaswami told NBC.
Will the electoral interference pitch be enough for Ramaswami to clinch a seat in the Georgia Senate? Not quite.
The district in which Ramaswami is contesting comprises counties with a high number of immigrants, with nearly a third of its residents being foreign born. The Asian community grew from making up 16% of the district’s population in 2010 to comprising 28% of its population in 2022.
That said, “there is a strong conservative streak among Indian Americans” in the area, an article in The New York Times noted. Moreover, as a whole, the district shows a Republican tilt. Trump had won the district in 2020, albeit by a narrow margin of three percentage points.
Nonetheless, Ramaswami’s entry has breathed life into the contest. His campaign has raised more than $700,000 in funding — a high amount for a debutant. Even his opponent has said that the race is getting close. “This race has become very real,” Still said at a campaign event.
