To recap what happened late Thursday and early Friday morning with the General Assembly, the state Senate received the SB 214 House substitute that would have allowed Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to select another foreign-made electronic voting system before he left office. That stipulation, along with the failure to remove the unreadable QR code from ballots before a July 1 deadline, forced Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and the Senate leadership to, in the style of President Trump, walk away from the deal.
As far back as 2019, critics of the current Dominion electronic voting system warned Raffensperger about spending over $100 million on a voting process that violated two Georgia statutes for voter verifiability and human readability. O.C.G.A. § 21-2-2(7.1); O.C.G.A. § 21-2-300(a)(2).
Now there is mounting pressure on Gov. Brian Kemp to call a special General Assembly session to address the unfinished election integrity issue (and perhaps one or two other lingering policy issues). But how to proceed with fixing the election mess?
One approach is that a bipartisan chorus has continually pointed out that the legislature years ago passed a law on what to do when the voting system is non-compliant and “impossible or impracticable” to use. The law calls for use of the backup paper ballot system as a workable, already-funded solution— which gives all Georgia counties sufficient time to implement it through Election Code rule-making. The backup system is hand marked ballots, counted by the current tabulation system. And then, audits of the machine results should follow.
Some lawmakers, journalists and others question whether hand-marked ballots are feasible (even though two-third of the states use them) and if there is enough time to switch to them. Others argue, though, that there is more than six months to prepare and ensure that poll worker training for the backup system they already use in emergencies is scaled up for everyone who can hand mark their ballots.
By the way, there are factions within the Republican and Democratic parties that also point out that the State Election Board (SEB) could order implementation of hand-marked papers ballots now. But that, of course, would trigger lawsuits.
But if no action is taken by July 1st, there’s bound to be lawsuits anyway.
