Kemp’s Evolving Position on Paper Ballots

I know some of you are going to think I’m beating a dead horse with this topic. Do I hate Brian Kemp? No. I just think he’s been lax with elections security, and that is a big part of the job he holds. One he was elected to do as Secretary of State. One he signed up for when he chose to run for that particular office.

You might blame library school. We spend two years being indoctrinated on the importance of government transparency and the security of personally identifiable information, two things which have been problematic in recent years in certain corners of our state.

Another thing that we digital librarians and archivists particularly care about is digitizing the public record. Take the folks at the Digital Library of Georgia. They’ve digitized past versions of annual state publications, such as the House and Senate Journals, which you can view in full online here.

Let’s take a look at the 2004 Senate Journal. Back then, Cathy Cox was the Secretary of State, and she had in the then-recent past launched our current set of electronic voting machines statewide so that Georgians could vote more easily and competently than our neighbors to the south. No hanging chads for us. We were going to use the touchscreen magic provided by Diebold to ensure our votes counted. Georgia seemed pretty forward-thinking when we were the first state to launch electronic voting statewide.

Of course, back then, George W. Bush was the president (in no small part because of Florida’s hanging chads), and Democrats everywhere, to surely include Cox and the majority of the Georgia General Assembly members at the time, felt cheated out of a Gore Administration. While Georgia looked like the cool kid on the block, have no doubt that this was a jab at Republicans and an attempt to hold onto power in a state that was turning from blue to red quickly.

As we’re all aware, the machines the state bought didn’t then and don’t now produce paper ballots.

Naturally, this sent Tom Price on a mission. He was still a state senator then, but he was just as dogged then as he ever was. I’ve had the joy of working with some former Price staffers who have told me many times that when Price found a mission, by heavens, it was an epic quest of researching and talking with experts and so much reading. What he may have lacked in the traditional “people person” skills that most legislators hone, Price made up in needing to know. It’s what gained him the reputation he had in Congress, which led to heading the Republican Study Committee, among other things; even if you totally disagreed with his positions, you knew he knew the issues, and you knew he had researched long and hard enough to find any problems that might possibly exist, particularly where Democratic ideas were concerned. And Georgia Democrats had spent a whopping amount of money on those electronic voting machines.

In his research of the Diebold machines, Price learned that they could be compromised, and that they could be glitchy. He found this totally unacceptable, so he wrote a bill requiring the machines to be equipped with printers that would produce a paper confirmation for voters of their recorded ballot. It was SB 500, which had bipartisan support in the Senate, yet stalled in the House.

In a March 11, 2004, article for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution entitled “Legislature 2004: Bipartisan bloc fights receipts for voters; Congressmen, Cox: Printers are too costly” (which I accessed through Newsbank, a pay site), reporter Carlos Campos noted at the time that equipping 28,000 voting machines with printers would cost the state $16 million, which Cathy Cox thought was too much to spend when she was certain Price’s worries would never come to fruition. However, he thought the cost was well worth it, saying “the fundamental question is whether or not citizens have faith in our system of voting. Greater confidence would be experienced by all citizens with an ability to have a paper trail audit for elections.”

Please remember in recent days, our current Secretary of State has called people who express the opinion seen in Price’s comment as trying to “tear down Georgia and our institutions.”

Really? Let’s refer to that Senate Journal I linked.

The final vote on SB 500 is on pages 1588-1589. On the motion to pass the bill, to require our current Diebold voting machines be hooked up to printers so that voters would be given a paper ballot as a security check, look who voted yea:

Huh. Tell me again who’s tearing down Georgia?