Buzz Brockway sponsored HR273 which called for a repeal of 17th Amendment and takes away our ability to vote directly for our U.S. Senator in the 2013-14 regular session. You can read the entire resolution here.
17th Amendment: The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.
By repealing the 17th Amendment he was advocating that the people of Georgia and every other state should never be allowed to vote for their Senator. Instead, he and other politicians would take that vote from you.
Fortunately this ALEC sponsored piece of garbage never passed. If you aren’t familiar with ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), it is a radical, right-wing group that operates in the shadows of government.
Until recently, few people outside of conservative political circles knew anything about the group. What we’ve discovered is that ALEC is a powerful group of corporations and lawmakers that sit at the table together to write our laws without our knowledge and then hand these laws to politicians to take back and enact. (Read more here: Rep. Buzz Brockway defends corporate funds ALEC membership)
Fast forward a few years and this ALEC pawn has decided that he wants to become our next Secretary of State. The Secretary of State is responsible for the administration of secure, accessible, and fair elections; registration of corporations; regulation of charities and securities; and oversight of professional license holders.
Unless you have been sleeping under a rock you know all about the Russian tampering with our elections. Georgia is currently using extremely hackable voting machines that use Windows 2000. This is an 18 year old operating system that is as secure as swiss cheese. Georgia is one of the last five states to rely entirely on electronic voting machines that don’t leave an independent paper backup. Roughly 70 percent of the country uses paper ballots.
On the last night of the session Senate Bill 403 thankfully died. This bill allowed the possibility of replacing the current machines with ones that would mark ballots with barcodes for computer tabulation. Barcodes are not a good alternative and would still leave the state vulnerable to hacking and also nearly impossible to accurately do any recounts or verification. Instead, the only sensible alternative one is filling out bubbles on paper ballots. A method that has been around since the 1800’s and is completely unhackable and ensures the integrity of the vote.
Marilyn Marks, an elections integrity activist explained how we could easily have paper ballots in the elections as early as November of this year.
Marilyn Marks along with many other like Jennifer Cohn, Strong Women Action Network, Peach Resist, Dana Bowers, Chrisoula Baikos and many others worked tirelessly to educate voters and legislators over the dangers of Senate Bill 403 which would have moved the state towards unverifiable bar codes to satisfy vendors and lobbyists who pad the pockets of the politicians like Brockway. Meanwhile Buzz Brockway did his absolute best to mislead voters and his fellow members of the Assembly. After SOS candidate Buzz Brockway approved an amendment to add a study committee to the barcode balloting bill, he claimed that it “REPLACED” #SB403 with a study committee. But no, it ADDED a study committee to the bad bill that permits barcodes. This was a slick maneuvering tactic to add barcodes later when no one was paying attention.
The reality is there is nothing that needs to be studied. Paper ballots are here and they work. Georgia is only one of five states in the entire country where elections cannot be audited or verified because there is no paper trail and we still rely on antique and vulnerable voting machines. Virginia made their switch to paper ballots extremely fast and so can Georgia.
Conclusion
Buzz Brockway has proven he is completely unfit to serve as our next Secretary of State. We have suffered through the tenure of probably one of the worst Secretary of State’s in the country under Brian Kemp. Do we really need a Kemp clone?
In case you need a reminder: Kemp was responsible for turning over sensitive GA. voter data to Trump’s now disbanded commission, released 6.1 million social security numbers, allowed voters to vote in the wrong district, issued the wrong ballots in the primary election, and perpetuated the targeting and disenfranchisement minority voters.
Any candidate that has advocated for the repeal of the 17th Amendment and also is being very deceptive in regards to moving to paper ballots does not deserve your vote. Don’t let Brockway #Buzzkill paper ballots.
