by CD Media StaffMarch 2, 2021

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For months after the questionable November, 2020 election results, the Arizona legislature fought hard to implement transparent elections. Their efforts resulted in a court decision last week that should allow a visual and forensic inspection of over two million Arizona ballots cast.

Meanwhile, the Georgia legislature continues to suppress attempts to provide transparent elections as the House and Senate moved HB531 and SB241 “omnibus” bills toward the Senate floor yesterday. Neither of the omnibus bills address election fraud revealed by testimony at a House committee and two Senate sub-committee hearings in December, nor do they address the evidence of fraud defined in court cases filed by Georgia voters at their own expense.

To deceive the public, Republican and Democrat politicians created classic false opposing dialogues. Democrat leaders claim there was no fraud while Republican leaders say they need to implement “voter fraud” prevention measures. The truth is that the November election was riddled with election fraud and related errors as we have briefly outlined in our 1st, 2nd and 3rd installments of our Georgia Election Integrity series. That evidence shows fraud was likely committed not by voters, but by election officials or those close to them.

A key in preventing election fraud by election officials is to is to operate transparent elections that hold them accountable. That means:

Making ballot images publicly available on a web site as is done by other jurisdictions;

Allowing a small group of electors to request visual ballot inspections including a rescan of ballots for forensic inspection if they supply their own scanning equipment and;

Requiring Elections Directors to make an image copy of their election management servers onto media supplied by a group of electors for independent forensic evaluations

But the two omnibus bills do nothing to prevent the type of election fraud that subverted the November 2020 election results from occurring again. Even if every measure in both bills is adopted, ballots, ballot images and system images will not be made publicly available so that citizens can have proper oversight of their own elections. Thus, Georgia leaders are trying to prevent voters from looking behind the curtain in their new version of “Wizard of Oz” voting.

The man behind the legislative curtain in Georgia’s “Wizard of Oz” voting scheme is Rep. Barry Fleming (R-Harlem). Fleming was elected to the Georgia House in 2002, the year Georgia’s original unverifiable voting system was installed. House Speaker David Ralston currently tasked Fleming with creating a new HB531 omnibus bill to fix HB316, his previous omnibus bill that required the least secure, most expensive option imaginable and led to the November, 2020 election disaster. The bill was sponsored in 2019 only by Ralston’s leadership team members. It paved the way for new Secretary of State (SoS) Brad Raffensperger to purchase the Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5 system after Texas rejected it for security reasons. Colorado also banned it for unverifiability.

HB316 legalized unverifiable voting that accumulates votes in bar codes the voter cannot read. The bill also authorized a new form of “ballotless” paper summary instead of a full ballot like those used for mail-in voting. SB241, authored by Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan, now proposes to force voters to vote on unverifiable voting equipment and give up real mail-in ballots by eliminating Georgia’s no excuse absentee balloting. The Georgia Senate is expected to pass that bill this week. HB531 has already passed the House with language that requires voters to turn in mail-in ballots 11 days in advance and prevents the SOS from delaying certification to complete audits even though they are critical to preventing election fraud.