On today’s BradCast: the Overton Window regarding gun safety reform may have just taken a dramatic lurch towards “the left”. And, then, the heated battle to block a new 100% unverifiable computer voting system (disguised as a “paper ballot” system) from being implemented in Georgia reaches a climax, as this year’s legislative session in the state nears its end. [Audio link to today’s show is posted at end of article.]
First up today (well, after a disturbing story out of Atlanta that further underscores the madness of Georgia’s proposed new voting system): Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens penned a stunning op-ed in the New York Times, lauding students for marching to demand gun safety legislation, but suggesting it’s time for them to go much further by calling for a repeal of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution itself.
The 97-year old retired Associate Justice (and lifelong Republican) explains why history and his years on the bench have led him to regard the 2nd Amendment as “a relic of the 18th century”, and how the National Rifle Association (NRA) has, in recent decades — as the conservative former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger declared in the early 90s — perpetrated “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
Then, speaking of great frauds, the city of Atlanta finds itself using pencil and paper to carry out business again today in municipal courts, jails and other city agencies five days after a “ransomware” attack has crippled the city’s use of its computer networks. Nonetheless, at the very same time, state lawmakers in Georgia are, incredibly enough, in last minute negotiations to adopt a measure to replace their statewide, easily-hacked, 100% unverifiable Diebold touch-screen computer voting systems.
Unfortunately, as legislators race the clock to pass a bill before the current legislative session ends on Thursday night, the current bill to replace those systems, SB-403, would institute a new 100% unverifiable computer-marked “paper ballot” system, which is now being opposed by both local and national election integrity advocates and organizations.
Longtime election integrity expert MARILYN MARKS, whose nonpartisan Coalition for Good Governance is suing the Peach State to force them to do away with their unverifiable Director Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines, joins us to warn about the proposed new scheme to replace them with similarly unverifiable touch-screen Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) and why she sees that as “going from bad to worse.”
“People today at least understand that their system is unverifiable, unauditable, and really a lot of guesswork,” she tells me. “Unfortunately, this new system that they are so determined to find a way to put in, kind of has the look, from a distance, of a paper system. But it really is just as unverifiable.”
Marks explains that the new legislation introduces computer-printed ballots with barcodes on them, which cannot be read by humans. Deceptively, the paper ballots produced by the new touch-screen systems also include a summary of the voters’ votes in human-readable form. But, it is the unreadable and impossible to verify barcodes — rather than the human-readable voter selections — which are used by the system’s computer optical-scanners to tally results. “What can be embedded in those bar codes may be very different from the human-readable list that is printed out,” she says.
Even if the barcodes weren’t printed on the paper ballots, Marks explains, the computer-marked ballots would still be unacceptable and unverifiable as reflecting any voter’s intent after polls close on Election Night, as Jennifer Cohn recently detailed in a must-read article at The BRAD BLOG. Marks offers action items for preventing the passage of the bill, for those both in and out of the state of Georgia (as summarized here in this Twitter Moment.)
This is important for folks in every state, since similar systems are already spreading nationwide and will assuredly do so even quicker if Georgia becomes the first in the nation to adopt them statewide — just as they were the first to go to touch-screen Diebold DREs statewide back in 2002. “We don’t want this insidious disease of these things — as we call it, ‘Son of DREs’ — going on to other states,” Marks cautions. “The minute that Georgia accepts this, the vendors will be out in other states trying to do the same thing. Change the definition of the ballot to include barcodes, and pointing to Georgia as ‘look the whole state of Georgia just said this was okay!'”
Similar systems are already being deployed in Texas, Tennessee, Los Angeles and elsewhere (though not yet in Missouri, where a Republican state legislator has, happily, just introduced a bill calling for DREs used in St. Louis and Kansas City to be replaced by real, HAND-MARKED paper ballot systems!)
Finally, Desi Doyen joins us today with the latest Green News Report, including some surprisingly good news from the massive omnibus spending bill just signed into law, begrudgingly, by Donald Trump…
Since 2018 is the year of the paywall, I was only able to see this headline from the New York Times:
Which, of course, had me dancing in the streets, waving the American flag that was on my dad’s coffin.
But then, somehow I got through to the whole story which had this anticipointing paragraph:
“WASHINGTON “” The Senate Intelligence Committee offered recommendations on Tuesday for securing American elections from foreign attacks, pressing states to buy voting machines that produce paper ballots” 🙁
My headline would have read:
Larry – In case you missed the show a few days ago, in which I had a word or two (understatement) to offer on that Senate call “for paper ballots”, it’s right back here.
It’s pretty disgusting to see the senators using the Russian scare to pimp secret elections in our sorry democracy.