Barry Loudermilk: “I thank my good friend from Illinois, an exceptional baseball player, as well, for yielding this time. Look, this is…”

“I thank my good friend from Illinois, an exceptional baseball player, as well, for yielding this time. Look, this is something I am very passionate about, and I am a bit surprised that one of my colleagues from Georgia would speak against this bill or even support this bill. Let's be frank. Yes, the Russians are bad. They are very bad. They seek to do harm to America, and they have been attempting to influence our elections for many years. Yes, we need to be concerned about election security. But if you want to secure our election system, this is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. The State of Georgia has recognized this. Just this year, our State legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill to spend $150 million to upgrade our electronic voting machines so that they will produce a verifiable ballot that represents the way the person voted at the machine. This is the direction we should be going, not to eliminate electronic ballots, not eliminate the efficiency that you get when you can walk in. The verifiable aspect of it, a voter is given a card, after it is verified who the voter is. When a voter walks into a voting precinct, they fill out the paperwork and show their ID, and they are given a card that identifies that they have been certified. They insert that card and vote electronically, and then it will produce a printed receipt that they can verify that this is the way they voted. That receipt goes into a box that is used for a recount.…”