Where Abrams failed, McKoon says “Hold My Beer”

Where Stacey Abrams failed, Georgia Republicans may succeed.

Stacey Abrams and her now-defunct organization, Fair Fight Action, long advocated for Georgia’s voting system to be scrapped in favor of hand-marked paper ballots.

In 2019, Fair Fight Action’s CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo, told GovTech, “hand-marked paper ballots are more secure than elections by machines.”

On the campaign trail for Governor, Stacey Abrams frequently cited the necessity of hand-marked paper ballots as essential to protecting “democracy.”

On a 2018 campaign stop, she encouraged voters not to vote on the voting machines, but to mail in their hand-marked paper ballots. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported her saying, “I believe in trust but verify. So we have to use the paper ballots that come with absentee balloting…” — advocating the paper option as a way to ensure votes are counted and verifiable.”

In 2018, Georgia voters were still voting on the Diebold machines, which, unlike the Dominion machines in use today, did not print a paper result of each voter’s ballot, which could then be compared to the electronic vote tally.

In 2019, after her first failed attempt to win the Governor’s mansion, she told the left-leaning Vox/Recode, “If anything, we should go back to analog, hand-marked paper ballots.”

Then again, in a 2020 interview in the Washington Post, Abrams again reiterated, “The most effective way to prevent hacking a voter machine is to go with the safest, gold standard, which is paper ballots. It is nearly impossible to hack a piece of paper, and it is an auditable way of voting.”

Fair Fight Action would eventually join as a plaintiff in the federal suit, Curling v. Raffensperger, which initially sought an order from the Court to declare Georgia’s use of the Diebold machines “unconstitutional” and wanted hand-marked paper ballots to be substituted.

As Fair Fight Action has faded into obscurity following Abrams’s second defeat to Gov. Brian Kemp and mounting costs from legal and ethics issues, in came the Election Integrity Industrial Complex™ to pick up the issue for Abrams and the left…advocating for hand-marked paper ballots.

Suddenly, and without explanation, the players have switched jerseys…from Democratic blue to Republican red.

Yesterday, a draft proposal, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, would have the Georgia House of Representatives require hand-marked paper ballots for Election Day voting for Georgia elections beginning with this year’s midterm elections. Not as a contingency. Not as an option. As a mandate. Those voting early would still be given a choice, at least for now.

The very remedy that Fair Fight Action begged federal courts to impose for years – and which judges consistently declined to order – has now resurfaced, not through more Democratic litigation, but through legislation.

And this time, it’s Republicans pushing it.

Within hours of the proposal’s introduction, Georgia GOP Chairman Josh McKoon released a statement endorsing the proposal and praising hand-marked paper ballots as a means of restoring voter confidence.

Where Abrams sued and failed, McKoon legislates to make her goals a reality.

Where Abrams failed, McKoon apparently says: hold my beer.

So let’s be clear: this isn’t some principled stand born of long-buried conviction by Josh McKoon. It’s a reversal worthy of late-night infomercials. The guy who once benefited financially from the very Democratic voter mobilization efforts he now blames for “stolen elections” is cheerleading – on GOP letterhead – for the very remedy his ideological antagonists touted only a few years ago.

The great partisan inversion

What makes this moment especially remarkable is not merely the policy proposal itself, but the complete partisan reversal surrounding it.

For years, paper ballots were the rhetorical holy grail of the left — the “gold standard,” the answer to hacking, the proof of legitimacy. Now that Republicans have embraced the same solution, Democrats appear suddenly less enthusiastic.

According to reporting by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Democratic lawmakers and election officials are now warning that mandatory hand-marked paper ballots could undermine election administration, create delays, increase human error, and introduce new security vulnerabilities.

“State Rep. Saira Draper, D-Atlanta, condemned the proposal, saying it would make it ‘easier to cheat and harder to vote.’”

The AJC also quoted Athens-Clarke County Elections Board Chair Rocky Raffle, who called the Republican backed bill a “half-formed proposal aimed at fixing an elections process that is not broken.”

The same ballots once heralded as democracy’s savior by the left, are now portrayed as a threat to it.

Same paper. Same pens. Very different politics.

As I have said before, this is the defining trait of the Election Integrity Industrial Complex ™: election rules are never evaluated on their merits, only on who is proposing them and whether they can be weaponized for fundraising, messaging, or litigation.

Are paper ballots actually safer?

Here’s the part no one in this debate likes to talk about.

There is no credible evidence that elections conducted exclusively with hand-marked paper ballots are categorically more secure than systems that produce voter-verifiable paper records and are subject to audits and recounts. Federal courts have declined to say so. Election security experts have declined to say so. Reality has declined to cooperate.

Paper ballots certainly eliminate certain risks, namely, fears of direct machine manipulation, but they introduce others, including:

• Ballot substitution
• Ballot destruction or “loss”
• Chain-of-custody vulnerabilities during transport and storage
• Hand-count manipulation or selective miscounting
• Increased opportunities for insider misconduct
• Delays that erode public confidence and invite post-election chaos

Paper ballots are not immune to fraud. They are merely analog, which makes the fraud easier to dramatize and harder to trace.

In fact, a November 2024 article in Scientific American states that jurisdictions that vote using electronic systems backed by auditable paper trails are the most secure. “Verified Voting estimates that nearly 98.6 percent of registered voters live in jurisdictions where votes have a paper trail of some form. Why is that important? It’s twofold. A paper trail provides a fail-safe. If something does go wrong with the systems—and what we’ve seen in certain elections is machines miscounting votes, never because of hacking, always because of an error in how they were configured—the paper ballots have been available to correct those mistakes.”

“Paper can’t be counterfeited” — except when it is

Paper-ballot advocates often claim paper ballots cannot be counterfeited. That claim does not survive even casual scrutiny.

Every year, despite watermarks, specialty inks, serial numbers, and aggressive federal enforcement, tens of millions of dollars in U.S. currency are counterfeited annually, with some estimates placing the figure far higher. If criminals can successfully forge Federal Reserve notes, among the most secure pieces of paper on earth, it is fanciful to suggest that locally printed election ballots are immune.

Paper doesn’t prevent fraud. Controls, transparency, audits, and enforcement do.

The lesson courts already taught us

Federal judges rejected Fair Fight Action’s repeated attempts to force hand-marked paper ballots not because they oppose paper, but because evidence matters. Remedies must be proportional. Elections are systems, not talismans.

Georgia already votes on paper. Those ballots are auditable. They are recountable. They were hand-counted – twice – in 2020.

Scientific American also highlighted this fact in their article, stating, “Georgia’s polling sites used hand-fed optical scanners; an audit of the nearly five million votes cast in the state, the largest hand count of ballots in recent U.S. history, confirmed that President Joe Biden won. County error rates were 0.73 percent or less, and most had no change in their tallies at all.”

What the Election Integrity Industrial Complex ™ sells is not security, but certainty theater: the comforting illusion that changing one visible component will finally silence doubt. It won’t. Because doubt was never the bug — it’s the business model.

So now, as Republicans dust off the very arguments Democrats once made – and Democrats recoil from the solutions they once demanded – voters should ask a simple question:

Are we trying to secure elections…or just keep the outrage industry fed?

Because if the last decade has taught us anything, it’s this: Paper ballots don’t end conspiracy theories. They just give them a different font.

At this point, Stacey Abrams doesn’t need another lawsuit — she needs to thank Josh McKoon for trying to carry her paper-ballot crusade across the finish line – while wearing a red jersey.