Georgia’s Undemocratic Non-Transparent Electronic Elections Bill SB403

At a time of escalated national concerns about election security, Georgia

lawmakers are rushing to further degrade the state’s election integrity, making
voting less secure and undemocratic. It’s hard to understand why both parties are
supporting SB403’s assault on the people’s elections.

The bill essentially concentrates all election software and controls in the hands of
the Secretary of State and removes oversight and meaningful checks and balances.
Proponents understand that “he who controls the software controls the result.” It’s
hard to understand why this elections policy concentrating power in a single
official and stripping out checks and balances has so many fans. Key points:

1.Barcode voting The bill permits new electronic voting by barcodes, which
cannot be read by human beings. Voters cannot verify that barcodes accurately
contain the choices they made on the touchscreen. A “paper ballot” is not cast by
the voter, but an electronic barcode is cast purportedly containing the votes to be
tabulated.

The new technology piloted in Conyers in November offers frightening new

opportunities for malicious attacks. Secretary Kemp praised this system as what
the state wants, and denigrated the use of paper ballots in an interview on March 3.

2. Centralized power without checks and balances SB403 mandates the

troubling policy that the Secretary of State (a partisan official) program and control
all the ballots and tabulation and report-writing applications. Because this creates a
single point of system failure, the vast majority of states delegate the work under
strict rules to local officials for local oversight and mandate check and balances.
To further facilitate the centralized programming operation, the bill mandates that
all equipment be identical in each county, ignoring differing local needs. These
two mandates assure one point of non-transparent central control and one point
of failure, making Georgia an easy target for malicious attackers.

3. Prohibiting audits Election audits are not permitted until 2024 unless the
partisan Secretary of State allows them. But the “audits” permitted starting in 2024
are limited to the gubernatorial and federal races. All other state and local contests
are exempted from audits. Also, with the new technology, voters lose their current
right to request a “re-canvass” of precincts when there are concerns about potential
erroneous tallies.
4. Unreliable “audit” records Sparse so-called “audits,” when permitted, are
fallacious and meaningless because they rely on voters actually thoroughly
checking a paper printout of their touchscreen choices and being able to remember
every contest on the ballot and how they voted in each race, with nothing to jog
their memories. (I am incapable of “verifying” my voting selections under such
conditions and believe that most human beings would have the same difficulty.)

5. Meaningless “recounts” Under SB403, recounts can be conducted by merely

rescanning the barcodes, assuring that the same result will be obtained, making a
recount a meaningless smoke and mirrors exercise.

6. Security vulnerability The new technology makes hacking and software errors
virtually undetectable. Computer scientists agree that the barcodes create numerous
opportunities for malicious users to inject their own software code into the system.

The bill proponents mislead voters by calling the system a “paper ballot system.”
Yet, the votes cast are embedded in a barcode (printed on paper) and not a “ballot.”
As Humpty-Dumpty told Alice, “When I use a word, it means what I choose it to
mean.” What do Secretary Kemp, the vendors and bill sponsors choose to mean,
when they call this a “paper ballot bill?”

If we saw such provisions being promoted in a non-democratic nation, we would

be rightly calling these “human rights violations.” Why are these undemocratic
principles being rushed into law in Georgia?

Voters should critically scrutinize the undemocratic policies underpinning this bill
and ask their representatives to oppose SB403.

Marilyn Marks
MarilynRMarks@earthlink.net