by Ty Tagami | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Members of the Republican-controlled State Election Board offered differing views on election security Thursday when lawmakers held their third of six listening sessions around the state.
Board members also disagreed about whether there is a problem.
“We can count our votes accurately on Election Day and we can trust the results,” board Chairman John Fervier said. Last year, he said, all 5.3 million ballots were scanned by an optical reader during an audit that found only 87 discrepancies, all but one due to human error during the counting of hand-marked ballots.
“That’s an incredible result that you would hope would silence a lot of the conspiracy theorists and naysayers that cause confusion by claiming that Georgia’s elections are rigged and unfair,” said Fervier, who was appointed to the board by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican.
But Janelle King, another Republican appointee on the board, pointed to problematic elections, such as one in DeKalb County in 2022 when a candidate lost election to a seat on the county commission only to win after a hand recount. Technical errors in scanners caused the initial miscount.
“Ask DeKalb Commissioner Michelle Long Spears if technology is reliable,” said King, who was appointed to the board last year by state House Speaker Jon Burns, a Republican from Newington. “So, it’s not to say that technology is all bad, but to assume that technology doesn’t fail is inaccurate. And to make people who feel like technology should not be the sole purpose out to be quacks or crazy, it’s just completely absurd.”
Raffensperger’s office disagreed with King’s account, saying after the hearing that she had misrepresented what happened in the Dekalb election. Human error — “a programming issue” — caused the technology problem that caused the miscount, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office said.
“The ballots and the scanners were not synced properly. That’s user error, not the machine’s fault,” Robert Sinners said. “If I microwave something for 20 minutes and it explodes, is that the microwave’s fault?” He added that it was “so sad seeing people who have the correct information blatantly ignoring it as the alternative fits their narrative better.”
King, like several who testified at the hearing at North Georgia Technical College in Clarkesville, wants paper ballots. Paper is likely coming because the legislature outlawed the QR code readers now used by the Dominion voting machines. Georgia elections must be conducted without those digital codes starting in July.
Those pushing for change also argued that the board should get more taxpayer dollars to pay for investigators and technology systems, so it does not have to rely on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
Lawmakers stripped Raffensperger of his role on the board, known as the SEB, after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and Raffensperger rebuffed Trump’s demand to find him more votes.
Brad Carver, a metro Atlanta district chairman of the state Republican Party, testified for a third time Thursday, having presented to lawmakers at both prior meetings, in Atlanta in July and in Rockmart in early August.
The election board needs more staff and its own attorney to make local election officials comply with the law and to clear a backlog of election-related complaints, said Carver, who also advocated for paper ballots.
“You have county election boards that are not following the law. They’re continuing to not follow the law. And the way that we can ensure uniform application is to have the SEB enforce that if you give them the appropriate authority,” said Carver.
His evidence of problems was a slide he showed that indicated 104% of voting-age Georgians were registered to vote. Carver did not have an answer when a Republican lawmaker on the panel asked if the number of voters in the numerator included those purged or about to be purged because they had not voted in years.
Then Rep. Saira Draper, D-Atlanta, pounced.
If 104% of eligible Georgians had voted, Carver would have brought that statistic, she said.
“That would have been a red flag of something going wrong. This in and of itself is completely explained by the inactive slash active voter process,” she said, suggesting that Carver was “fear mongering” with misleading statistics.
The meeting revealed deep personal divisions on the board, with its recently hired executive director, James W. Mills, publicly excoriating Fervier, who is technically one of his bosses.
“After almost 30 years of being in and out of the state, I’ve never served under a more dysfunctional, dishonest chairman than Chairman John Fervier,” said Mills, 62, a former state representative and member of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles who has been in his new role for a few months.
Draper later called that attack embarrassing, saying she felt like she was at home managing fights between kids. She also questioned whether Mills had the requisite expertise for his new job, and he responded that nearly two decades of running for office was experience enough.
The House Election Procedures Study Committee will hold another hearing on Sept. 18 at Savannah Tech.
