Yesterday state Sens. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta, Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, William Ligon, R-Brunswick and Burt Jones, R-Jackson called for a special General Assembly session to address measures to secure legal voting. They said serious election problems and reforms can only be addressed by the entire legislative body. However, the governor and GOP leadership of both legislative chambers so far don’t have an appetite for such a session.
At the same time, a bipartisan group The Coalition for Good Governance is asking Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to conduct the upcoming January 5 runoff elections using hand marked paper ballots, scanned with optical scanners “followed by simple and thorough post-election audits conducted with uniform standards and complete transparency.”
Early voting begins in about three weeks, and election workers in all 159 counties have been working hard since early October. They are facing a recount in coming days and preparations for the January election. In this context, the Coalition says in a press release, “Substituting hand marked paper ballots (identical to those used as mail ballots) for use in polling places would greatly lessen the counties’ extreme workload and financial costs.”
“The uniform three race ballot (two U.S. Senate runoffs and a Public Service Commission contest) that will be used across the state in January makes identical hand marked paper ballots far simpler, easier and less expensive to use than touchscreen BMDs. The (state elections) Board has the authority to find that the use of touchscreen BMDs is ‘impracticable’” in the January election given the pandemic, the massive complexity and labor resources involved in BMD use, and the time pressures of the unprecedented intense election activities. BMDs inarguably require exponentially more local resources than hand marked paper ballots.”
As for the special session call, the Republicans senators say it should include the presenting of any evidence of voter fraud from the Government Oversight Committee hearings as well as any new evidence that comes to light to the full legislative body.
Furthermore, they say in a statement, “the call should provide for implementation of a notary or photo ID requirement for absentee by mail voting. As the risk limiting audit has shown,” they say, “we have structural issues with the implementation and proper execution of our ballot counting procedures. The call should allow for changes to existing law to ensure that we never again miss the counting of thousands of ballots in any Georgia county as we all witnessed last week. This may require appropriation of funding to accomplish these enhancements for the January runoff election.”
And on the Georgia legal front…
Atlanta attorney Lin Wood is promising big legal news will be happening soon. Wood, who has been warning Gov. Brian Kemp and Raffensperger that he is targeting them, has already revealed one move. In his first tweet in a series of tweets, Wood said:
Would someone ask my never-to-be friend Brad Raffensperger @GaSecofState if he has seen this tape of election fraud at State Farm Arena in Fulton Co., GA?
Several people have seen it. Many more will see it soon.
Video camera eye does not lie.
How do you spell Election Fraud?
The attorney, who is a member of President Donald Trump’s legal team, included two images of a subpoena for Atlanta Hawks Vice President Scott Wilkinson from the U.S. District Court– with Raffensperger listed as the defendant. Wood wants to know why ballot counting was shut down for several hours on the night of November 3rd at State Farm Arena because of a supposed “water leak” — and observers were told to go home. And all this happened while the counting is said by witnesses to have still been going on.
