Atlanta Progressive News

Below is an email obtained by Atlanta Progressive News concerning the recent presentation made by VoterGA to the Georgia Supreme Court:

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Hello all VoterGA Supporters,
As you know the Georgia Supreme Court hearing was held yesterday morning and it seem to go very well. Both Mark and I felt that Walker presented our case very clearly. The five judges present listened intently but strangely did not ask as many questions as they did in the prior cases. Walker believes that since we are the Appellants, it is a good sign they understand our arguments. Those arguments are legally simple:

When facts are in dispute a trial is required;
All U.S. Supreme Court case law for vote counting and recounting cases dictates strict judicial scrutiny of the process (which places the burden on the defense);

Walker also submitted our disputes and corrections for the record and that seemed to upset the opposing counsel, Stefan Ritter. During his argument he falsely claimed that we are against electronic voting even though I personally handed him, during my deposition, an authenticated copy from Richard Van Slyke of my House Committee testimony in favor of HB 790, one of the electronic voting audit trail bills many of us supported. There was virtually nothing of significance new in the opposing counsel’s argument, most of which was immaterial to the key legal issues that the court must decide. We had already disputed in the lower court every key assertion made to the Supreme Court and we had to enter the disputes again with the Supreme Court because their counsel simply ignored them.

…Thank you to those of you who attended. I believe that our presence was felt by the justices as we nodded in agreement with several of Walker’s comments and shook our heads during the false statements from the other side. The justices picked up on that but did not ask us to refrain.

As I mentioned before, there are several possible outcomes, most of them, good:
· The court may uphold the lower court rulings;
· The court may grant us a trial with instructions to the lower court based on the 17 errors of fact and conclusions that we disputed in the lower court’s findings;
· The court may overturn the denial of our original Summary Judgment motion and grant us a victory which cannot be appealed by the state;
· The court may issue some form of cautionary to the legislature to resolve the issue in the next session;

Nevertheless, it may be somewhat difficult to get the state to rule against itself in spite of the law and evidence we present in our written arguments. Should we still receive an unfavorable ruling we have the option of taking a subset of the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.