Voting groups target Georgia ballot initiative

Concerns around lack of clarity on verifiable paper records.

Several election integrity organizations are unifying against a bill to change Georgia’s voting system, saying the legislation fails to ensure verifiable election results.

The legislation, Senate Bill 403, would replace Georgia’s electronic voting machines with a system that uses paper to some extent.

But opponents of the measure say it doesn’t truly commit to paper ballots for audits and recounts.

They’re concerned the bill would allow the state to continue its heavy reliance on voting methods that could be vulnerable to hacking and would give county election supervisors the power to refuse to do paper recounts, even in close races.

“It’s really important that Georgia gets this right,” said Marian Schneider, the president of the Verified Voting Foundation, a Philadelphia-based organization whose mission is to safeguard elections. “The voting system that Georgia chooses has to have a voter-marked paper ballot that’s retained by the system and is available for recount and audit.”

Georgia is one of the last five states to rely entirely on electronic voting machines that don’t leave an independent paper backup. Roughly 70 percent of the country uses paper ballots.

Lawmakers say they want to leave the state’s options open as elected officials decide on a replacement voting system during the next year. If the bill passes, Georgia’s next secretary of state would choose the voting system by March 2019, and then the General Assembly would have to decide whether to fund it.

Under the voting system favored by election integrity groups, voters would make their choices by filling in bubbles on paper ballots.

Another option is a voting system with touch-screen machines that print out voters’ choices along with a bar code for computer tabulation. Under both systems, voters would cast their ballots by feeding them into a ballot scanner.

State Rep. Ed Setzler, a House sponsor of the bill, said it would move the state to a paper-based voting system without committing to a specific format.

“That’s not the battle of the Legislature. That’s the battle of the town hall meetings,” Setzler, a Republican from Acworth, told a group of election integrity advocates last week. “This is the venue to make a kind of muscle movement to get us to paper, then you guys are in the game and then we get into rules and practices.”

Common Cause of Georgia, a government accountability organization, is urging voters to contact legislative leaders to ask them to stop the voting machine bill.

“We believe this bill is unethical, nontransparent, and is NOT a paper ballot bill as it’s being sold,” Common Cause wrote on Twitter.

Garland Favorito, who founded a group called Voter GA to seek secure elections, said the state is on the verge of making the same mistakes it made in 2002 when it switched to electronic voting machines.

The current version of the legislation “sets the stage for Georgia to repeat its voting system history,” Favorito said.

BOB ANDRES /BANDRES@AJC.COM The bill to replace Georgia’s voting machines passed in committee, but is seeing push back from bothGeorgia and out-of-state election integrity groups.