I believe that if you love something, you need to be willing to fight for it. That’s what motivates my participation in Sierra Club and that’s why I’ve been active in political work since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.
I have been in the fight for election integrity for about two solid years now. It appears very likely that Sierra Club will be joining in locally with support from its national democracy initiative in 2020. Given that, I thought the Georgia Chapter’s membership might appreciate an update on the battle for fair Georgia elections from my view inside a federal courtroom.
I am one of the plaintiffs in Curling v. Raffensberger, the lawsuit challenging the adequacy of Georgia’s election machinery. We are fighting for constitutionally adequate elections for all Georgians. We seem to be winning. (“Curling,” by the way, refers to Donna Curling, a great Sierra Club champion. Our hands are all over this fight!)
The first step in the suit was to demonstrate that the touch screen machines we’ve been using are unreliable and insecure. We did that successfully. U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg recently ruled that those machines and the software system Georgia uses to operate elections are constitutionally inadequate and must be retired. And — here I’m being generous — her rulings also strongly suggest that the people running Georgia’s elections could stand to get a whole lot better at their jobs.
That, unfortunately, isn’t enough. Finally forced to face the obvious fact that our elections are subject to tampering, the State moved to replace the old system with something new. Earlier this year, the General Assembly passed a bill pushed by the defendant in our case, Secretary of State Raffensberger, that will retire the old machines and sets aside $150 million to implement a new voting system using ballot marking devices, or BMDs.
That is an incredible amount of money. It is also deeply dumb, since the BMD system they want to buy is just as hackable as the old system.
Election integrity experts, including two the state of Georgia hired and ignored, are essentially unanimous that the safest way to vote is not with computer touchscreens and barcoded ballots, but with paper ballots filled in by hand and tabulated in the precinct where the votes were cast. We are also arguing for independent, risk-limiting audits of our election results so there can be no doubt that the results are right every time in every election.
What we want adopted is simpler, safer and provides voters assurance that the vote they intend is the vote that will be counted. It is also LOTS cheaper. We can save over $100 million transitioning to a hand-marked paper ballot system rather than a BMD system.
The lawsuit has had a dozen twists and turns, and I expect several more before it ends. The important thing to know is that the judge and all the plaintiffs in the case seem to be in agreement about one fundamental truth: Georgians need to have elections they can believe in. That means a voting system that can’t be subverted by hacking or malfeasance, a system we can trust will reveal the people’s will. We’re fighting against the dumb BMDs and we’ll keep fighting until we secure Georgia’s elections.
The upcoming 2020 elections are monumental. Our entire focus has been to get this problem fixed so that your vote and mine will actually count in 2020. That fight isn’t over, but I am absolutely convinced it is a fight we can and will win.
Jeff Schoenberg
Sierra Club Georgia Chapter Executive Committee Chair