The US Senate Will Turn on Georgia Election Protection
By Professor Harvey Wasserman
The fate of the US Senate — and much of the Biden Administration — will depend on how well election protection activists can protect Georgia’s voter registration rolls —and its vote count.
As the nation well knows, two Republican US Senators will face runoffs in January. If both seats go to the Democrats, they will have a 50-50 split in the US Senate. Ties could then be regularly broken by its presiding officer, the Vice President of the United States — Kamala Harris.
Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams nearly won control of the statehouse in 2018 with a massive voter registration drive. Only dubious breakdowns with the state’s voting machines prevented her from becoming Georgia’s first black female Governor.
This year, the massive COVID shift to vote-by-mail with paper ballots may give Democrats a chance to pick up two contested US Senate seats in special elections in January.
The ballots will be mostly be counted on digital scanning machines. Once ballots are fed into these machines they produce digital images that can be read and counted in an instant. The paper ballots are then preserved.
The ballot images are automatically stored in the scanners’ memories, easily facilitating recounts. But they are susceptible to hacking, especially if supplied with internet modems. In Florida and elsewhere, election boards have been prone to discarding the ballot images, and utterly senseless decision….unless you are intending to cheat.
Between a massive voter registration push, a savvy election protection campaign, a well-run vote by mail program, and carefully preserved digital ballot images, Georgia in January could have the fairest, best-run election in its history.
But with a strident Trump-committed Governor and a Secretary of State with a dubious track record, it will all depend on a powerful election protection movement to make it happen.
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