VoterGA Supporters,

On Tuesday, Representative Tim Bearden introduced a bi-partisan bill that would ban existing unverifiable electronic voting equipment in Georgia and provide for Georgia voters to use optical scan voting on Election Day. Co-sponsors currently include Karla Drenner, Austin Scott, Barry Loudermillk and Bobby Franklin. More are expected this week.

While many of us have been technology neutral in regards to voting machines, this bill seems to have everything that all E-voting rights activists have wanted. The provisions of this bill are:

·         It eliminates Direct Recording Electronic voting in Georgia which currently has no means to be audited;

·         It eliminates lever machine voting which has no means to produce a ballot;

·         It provides for precinct level audits to verify that optical scan tabulations are correct;

·         It requires recounts to be conducted by hand to ensure that original election results were correct;

·         It defines a ballot as paper only so that it can be verified, audited and recounted properly;

·         It provides a consistent means of voting for absentee and Election Day voters;

·         It removes potentially unconstitutional language in the current Georgia Election Code;

 
The next step in the legislative process is for this bill to have a hearing in the House Governmental Affairs Committee. Upon conclusion of the hearing the committee will vote to table the bill or move it to the Rules Committee which can then choose to move it to the House floor for a full House vote. If you would like for the bill to be heard (or not) you can express your request to chairman Mark Hamilton or his assistant Pam Norwood at 770 844-6768 or mark.hamilton@house.ga.gov.

You can also express your request to the other committee members. Their names and contact information can be found at:
http://www.legis.ga.gov/legis/2009_10/house/Committees/govAffairs/gahgaff.htm 

The overview of the bill is located here:
http://www.legis.ga.gov/legis/2009_10/sum/hb1215.htm

The full text of the bill is:
http://www.legis.ga.gov/legis/2009_10/versions/hb1215_LC_28_5048_a_2.htm

BALLOT ACCESS UPDATE

The same House Governmental Affairs Committee members are also considering the HB1141 ballot access bill introduced by Bobby Reese. HB 1141 reduces the statewide petitioning limit for an independent candidate from 1% of registered voters (about 40,000+ signatures) to 5,000 total signatures. You can weigh in on this bill too when you contact the House Government Affairs chairman and committee members previously mentioned.

Another ballot access bill has been introduced in the Senate by David Shafer. This bill allows any political body whose candidate gets one percent of the vote in a previous election to have ballot access in all races. Currently access is only given for statewide races. The bill also allows an independent political body (Green Party, Constitution Party, Libertarians) to nominate the candidate of a major political party (Republicans, Democrats) as their candidate. If they choose to nominate such a candidate, the independent political bodies do not get credit for the votes received by the "Fusion candidate" towards their own ballot access requirements.

The Senate bill was assigned to the Ethics Committee rather than the State and Local Governmental Operations Committee. The chairman of that committee is Dan Moody. His contact information is 404 463-8055, dan.moody@senate.ga.gov The committee member's contact information can be found at:

http://www.legis.ga.gov/legis/2009_10/senate/ethics.php

If both of these bills were to pass it would be a significant improvement for independent candidates. A more comprehensive ballot access bill will also be introduced in the coming weeks and I will keep you posted on that.

Garland Favorito
404 664-4044 CL
www.voterga.org