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Dekalb County, election worker
DeKalb County election workers sort presidential ballots during recount efforts in Stonecrest, Georgia, on November 14, 2020. Photo credit: © TNS via ZUMA Wire

As Georgia gears up for its runoff senate elections, the Coalition for Good Governance advocates for transparency and security from the state government.

Republicans calling for the resignation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger are echoing some of the findings of long-time nonpartisan election security advocates in the state.

In this episode of the Scrutineers Series, Jeanne Dufort, a volunteer with the Coalition for Good Governance, shares background about the challenges to some of the state’s decisions about how to conduct its elections. The group is partly responsible for ending the state’s use of the insecure and dangerously outdated DRE voting equipment before 2020.

Dufort and Levy talk about the voting systems in the state within their historical context and look at pursuing hand-marked paper ballot options for voters through lawsuits and pressure on the government. The conversation turns to how people can help protect the Georgia runoff elections from inside and outside the state.

In this peculiar moment when partisan complaints about election results sometimes blur the public’s understanding of fact-based election security concerns, Dufort’s clear and educated voice is a gift to all who care about fair elections.

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Emily Levy: Welcome to the Scrutineers Series. I’m Emily Levy, founder and director of Scrutineers.org. I’m delighted to be collaborating with whowhatwhy.org to introduce a series of election protection podcasts designed to help you understand the risk to our elections from voter suppression, to lack of security. We’ll be talking about what you can do to protect the voters and protect the votes.

Emily Levy: We’re training a fairness force to help make sure no one stops you from voting and all those are counted accurately. The state of Georgia drew national attention this year for its close presidential election, along with the combination of recount, re-canvass and risk limiting audit in that race, which resulted in none of those processes, following appropriate laws or procedures. And then it’s re-recount. There’s no rest for weary election officials, election workers, and election protectors in the state. Not only do they have the January 5th Senate runoff elections to prepare for, which will determine the balance of power in the Senate, but some parts of the state have another runoff election between now and then.

Emily Levy: Meanwhile, the sudden Republican objections to use of the state’s new Dominican election system, echo concerns that have been not only raised, but litigated for years by the Coalition for Good Governance, the group whose lawsuit resulted in ending the state’s use of insecure, hackable, riggable, direct record electronic touchscreen voting systems.

Emily Levy: Their litigation is still in process, and it’s already resulted in a number of preliminary rulings as well as some disturbing findings in the discovery phase. Lawsuits are an important tool in the election protection toolbox that we haven’t discussed much on the Scrutineers series until today.

Emily Levy: I’m delighted to introduce to you today, my guest, Jeanne Dufort, who is a volunteer with the Coalition for Good Governance in Georgia and has been doing this work for three years. I’m so impressed by the group’s work and I want to thank you so much for taking the time to be here today, especially in such a busy election season.

Jeanne Dufort: It’s great to be with you. Thank you.

Emily Levy: Let’s talk a little bit about what the Coalition for Good Governance is, to start off with. How is it different from other groups that are out there and what is its focus?

Jeanne Dufort: The Coalition for Good Governance’s unique focus is on ending electronic vote suppression. We’re a very small nonprofit. We get super in the weeds about election processes and election law. We bring top first-class experts to bear on it so we have an impact. Some people say we bat above our pay grade. We’ve had tremendous success in the courts in bringing some equity to Georgia, but we’re probably best known for the ongoing three-year legal saga that already wound up with … We’re probably best known for the three-year litigation in federal court that has already resulted in banning the Georgia election system, the old one.

Jeanne Dufort: And now we’re working to get the new system ruled out on similar constitutional grounds. That’s pretty legendary. There’s never been a statewide system that’s been banned by a federal court judge.

Emily Levy: And most states don’t have a statewide systems. That’s a unique thing about Georgia. Tell our listeners what the old system is that you got banned and why you went after it. Let’s start there to give some context.

Jeanne Dufort: Sure. And to give you even a little further context. Before 20 years ago, Georgia was the wild, wild west of elections. We have 159 counties and we had at least 25 different ways of accounting for votes. It was very hard to wrestle it all together and have a statewide count that you really trusted. After the ‘hanging chad’ thing in Florida, there was a wave nationally to go electronic. And that’s when Georgia made the decision under Cathy Cox, a Democratic secretary of state, to bring in DREs, the, the direct recording devices and –

Emily Levy: Which are also known as touchscreen voting machines.

Jeanne Dufort: Touchscreens, but touchscreens without any printed piece of paper. Once you voted, once you saw it, you vote on your screen and you hit vote, it cast your ballot, and it went into a black hole. Within three or four years of Georgia spending all that money on it, it was already becoming clear that there were serious security problems with this way of voting.

Jeanne Dufort: And in fact, a trend started to go back to hand-marked paper ballots nationally, but Georgia hung on and hung on and hung on. And by the time Georgia finally was ready to give it up, we got it banned. The system had not even been supported by Microsoft for years. The security level of it was just appalling.

Emily Levy: You say it as though it’s just like, ‘Oh, we filed a lawsuit and it got banned.’ But actually this is the lawsuit that’s going on for a really long time. Do you want to tell any about that?

Jeanne Dufort: Yeah. I mean, basically we put together a picture for this federal judge that explained … The essence of the finding was that we have a federal right to understand and know and have confidence that our votes are counted as cast. And with the DRE machines that was simply impossible to verify for voters. Just beginning and end of … I mean, there’s a very long story and lots of filings and lots of hearings, but that’s the essence of it. Is that you, voters need to be able to have confidence that the vote they cast is what wound up getting counted.

Emily Levy: And then when the DREs were banned, was there a system that Coalition for Good Governance was promoting and is that the system that Georgia went with to replace the DREs?

Jeanne Dufort: Sure. We believe very simply that the less tech you have in voting, the safer you are. Rich DeMillo of Georgia Tech is, well, one of the smartest guys I know. He was once the chief technology officer of Hewlett Packard, and he’s just opening up a whole new school for cybersecurity in elections at Georgia Tech. So very smart guy. And he explained it to me very simply one day because we’re in a world where electronics are our life. You and I are communicating, thanks to electronics right now.

Jeanne Dufort: Our intuition is electronics makes things easier, but in fact, every company, and Rich does a lot of work with big corporations, huge corporations, multinational corporations. Every company that has to protect data expects to not only make an upfront investment at protecting that data, but an ongoing investment, a significant ongoing investment guarding against what he calls advanced persistent threats. That is, the attack is evolving.

Jeanne Dufort: Every day there’s a new day with some new attack coming and you’ve got to constantly spend money to guard on that. And as he explains it in years of working with election folks, governments don’t want to spend large amounts of money on an ongoing basis on elections. And so we’re just fundamentally unable to comprehend how we would publicly fund an election system that would be fully prepared to adapt itself to these advanced persistent threats. And if you’re not prepared to do that, you ought to get off the playing field and simply not put your vote in a place where it can be hacked.

Emily Levy: Makes sense to me. And that I’ve never heard it described that way. That actually makes a lot of sense because government agencies tend to fund the purchase of things and then we don’t have that kind of follow-up funding. And in fact, a lot of small counties don’t even have an IT person who can install upgrades if they’re made, so – updates to a system.

Jeanne Dufort: Two Georgia examples: First of all, the system that got replaced was 18 years old. Think about that.

Emily Levy: Which in computer years is what? 600.

Jeanne Dufort: A lifetime. But here’s the crazy part: when Georgia made the decision to buy the new ballot marking device system, it financed it on a 20-year note. Georgia taxpayers borrowed money for 20 years for a system that’s comprised of tablets, printers and scanners, which have a shelf life of maybe five years.

Emily Levy: Wow.

Jeanne Dufort: So the mentality really-

Emily Levy: As I understand it –

 
Emily Levy: Sorry, and as I understand it, the new ballot marking device system is also run on software that is already outdated at the time it was purchased. Isn’t it?

Jeanne Dufort: The problem of that … I used to be in the manufacturing business, not in the high tech manufacturing business, but still I understand the mentality of manufacturing and supply chain distribution. One of the problems is, is our system of getting election equipment approved at a federal level – and it has to be certified to use it -it’s so cumbersome that it disincentivizes the people who are manufacturing that and bringing that to market from constantly upgrading and staying constant. So two forces are working against one another.

Emily Levy: Interesting. Tell us about this new ballot marking device system that Georgia bought for the whole state.

Jeanne Dufort: [chuckle] Essentially all you need to know about it is we decided that a $3,000 set of a tablet and a printer ought to replace a $1 pen to do the same thing. A voting activity is comprised of three parts, really. You check in, so you’ve got the voter database check-in process. That’s mostly electronic now. We bought some new e-poll books to facilitate that. Then there’s, how do you mark the ballot? In Georgia were marking it with an expensive tablet and then printing out a summary of your vote.

Jeanne Dufort: You could do that with a piece of paper and a pen, and then finally casting your vote and casting your vote happens by putting it through a scanner or dropping it in a box. If you went super low tech and we’re going for hand counts.

Jeanne Dufort: All we’re saying right now with the coalition is take out that centerpiece, keep the system in place, keep the check-in, keep the scanner, but just replace that $3,000 piece of equipment with a pencil and pen. Interestingly enough, in our largest county, Fulton County, we did a process analysis with them in December, I think it was. They use an extra … couldn’t have been December. Anyway, they use an extra 25,000 labor hours. Every time for every election, they deploy the BMDs with, versus a hand-marked paper ballot system.

Emily Levy: In one county.

Jeanne Dufort: In one county, every election.

Emily Levy: And now BMDs or something like it, it’s required to have at least one per polling place to provide access for voters with disabilities that would prevent them from using a pen, to mark a paper ballot. How much money could be saved given that they would have to have one BMD per polling place anyway? By going to all hand- marked paper ballots, for those who are able to mark them?

Jeanne Dufort: In Georgia, what that means is we’d have maybe 2,700 of them and we have 33,000 of them.

Emily Levy: That’s a bit of a difference.

Jeanne Dufort: It is a bit of a difference. And for every BMD that … So the reason you save all that labor hours separate from the cost of the equipment side. That’s one piece of it. The reason you save those labor for every time you have a machine, think about it with the machine in your pocket, your cell phone. Every time you buy a device, it has costs associated with it. Ongoing something or other.

Jeanne Dufort: Well, in this case, these machines, the kinds of costs they have are, if you’re using electronics in elections, you’ve got to do something called logic and accuracy testing, which is checking them in advance to make sure that with the particular ballots, for this particular election, if you try to vote, the vote comes out right.

Jeanne Dufort: You’ve got to do that upfront. That’s not an insubstantial time investment. You’ve got to pack them all up and move them from point A to point B, the ebb and flow from warehouse to polling place happens at every single election, like a machine. In small counties, that’s a small project, but in big counties, that’s a huge project involving truckers and there’s a very narrow time window, and that has to happen.

Jeanne Dufort: You’ve got that cost. You’ve got costs of additional for the BMDs because you’ve got to protect them and because they’re a little complicated to operate, you need more poll workers in a polling place when you’ve got those, instead of handing people, pen and paper. So just each and every one of those little touches adds up. Over and above that is the cost of storing them. And then long-term of course, maintaining them. Everyone came with a two-year warranty program, but after that, you’ve got to pay annual fees. You’ve got to pay licensing fees for the software. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Emily Levy: The Coalition for Good Governance lawsuit is focused on the BMDs. Yet, I think it’s important to mention that the other parts of the process that you have just described, the check-in computers, the scanners, the storage chain of custody, which you didn’t use that term, but you were talking about that in terms of transport, that there are security issues with all of those things. And so they just don’t happen to be the piece that the lawsuit is about. As we’re speaking, Georgia is still doing some of the post-election processes following the general election and preparing for the statewide runoff elections on January 5th. And in some places, even between now and then another set of runoffs in more local races.

Emily Levy: One of the things that I’m wondering is what impact the ongoing lawsuit may have on those upcoming races?

Jeanne Dufort: We –

Emily Levy: Because I know there’ve been interim rulings along the way.

Jeanne Dufort: There have been. The most recent rulings came in October just before election day. There were two rulings. One was very comprehensive 147 pages. If you want to read it, go on coalitionforgoodgovernance.org. It’s linked there. It’s pretty fascinating reading. And the judge essentially said, ‘Gosh, you have the probability of success when the full hearing comes around. You’ve presented all kinds of credible evidence, but it’s so close to the election that I don’t really think we can make a change at this point. But the secretary of state better be prepared because there’s some real problems here, so don’t ignore them.’

Jeanne Dufort: That was sort of her first big ruling. She followed that up a couple of days later with a very small ruling on a very, very, very small protection we had asked for, which was there’ve been ongoing and persistent problems of just performance problems with this equipment, with the check-in systems, of voters registering and also with the BMDs.

Jeanne Dufort: The state election board had put in place a plan for emergency paper ballots, for paper ballots to be in the polling place ready for 10% of registered voters in case the equipment broke down. We were asking to have an effective paper poll book backup so that voters could be checked in. When the big switch happened in Georgia, COVID brought hand-marked paper ballots to Georgia in the form of no- fault mail, absentee validating. We’re a no-fault state.

Jeanne Dufort: The number of mail ballots swelled from a previous high of about 250,000 in a race to close to two million for the June election and 1.3 million for this current election. All of a sudden we’re in the hand-marked paper ballot business in Georgia anyway. But we’d also seen problems with check-in with in-person voting.

Jeanne Dufort: We asked for an effective paper public backup because the system was having trouble figuring out when somebody presented themselves in person, what was happening with that mail ballot that they might’ve been asked for, might’ve been issued, maybe it was lost in the mail. Maybe it was cast, maybe it wasn’t. Without an updated paper backup, we had a paper backup, but it wasn’t updated right up to election day the same way the poll books were so you couldn’t use them to let people vote. You could use them to let them vote provisional, but not to cast their ballot in precincts.

Jeanne Dufort: We said, ‘Look, it’s not the voters’ fault that you’ve got this lag in the system. We ought to have a paper backup that lets them do it.’ She ruled in favor of that. Insanely enough, or surprisingly enough, our secretary of state appealed it, appealed it to a three-person court and the appeals court in a one sentence ruling said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to stay that ruling from the judge.’ Right now that’s been stayed so we did not have an effective backup on election day.

Emily Levy: I just want to say, I know this lawsuit has been going on for three years and I’ve been following it closely enough to know that this is not the first time that the judge has made a ruling that it’s too close to the election to make a change that should actually be made to keep the election secure. And given that you didn’t just file the lawsuit, but that it’s been going on for years, from my distance, it seems unforgivable that she was in that situation a second time. And I don’t really understand how that could happen, that you know, was it the 2018 or the 2019 election where she said it was too close to the election to change away from these systems that are absolutely abominable?

Emily Levy: But it’s really disturbing to me to have that happen again. I had the fortune because of COVID of being able to listen from my home in California, to some of the testimony in your lawsuit in the last few months. And you in particular – I was really astounded by some of the testimony that you gave about a test that you did, of the scanners and their accuracy. This is something that you personally did. And I would love for you to take a couple minutes to tell our listeners about that. This is about the scanners that scan the ballots that are either marked by hand or marked by the ballot marking device, right?

Jeanne Dufort: That’s right. And I’ll say we use two kinds of scanners in Georgia. We have central high-speed scanners at the election office. And those are generally used to scan all of the mail ballots. But in precinct, we have a much lower grade of scanner in every precinct and it’s slower and that scans anything that is voted in precinct. We had seen anomalies in the scanning, even with the high-speed scanners and the mail ballots that we discovered that it was under counting some ballot votes that humans would agree were votes. But we hadn’t really had a chance to test the precinct scanners.

Jeanne Dufort: I will say one of the benefits of the timing of, let’s call it the awakening of the court, the bad news was that she didn’t feel it was in time to give us the ruling we had hoped for. But the good news was we were able to move into a period of permissible discovery. We’d been able to get our hands on equipment, for example, and the scanning exercise was one of those examples. We would not have been allowed to access the equipment to test it, other than that the judge in fact, ordered discovery to begin.

Jeanne Dufort: I’ll give some shout out to the court for that because the opportunity to be up close and personal throughout this general election season has been resulted in a tremendous collection of evidence that eventually will get produced in court. The scanner exercise, we had noticed erraticism so we wanted to test exactly to what degree that would be true. We made our own test deck of hand marked paper ballots, and we marked them in all different kinds of ways with different bends and different styles of marking.

Jeanne Dufort: And then we started putting them through this precinct scanner to see what would happen. And ultimately, I found a particular ballot, one of many that was performing erratic, but I picked that one and I decided to put it through the four different possible ways you could run a piece of paper through. Top first, bottom first, front side, bottom side – four possible ways to put a piece of paper through.

Jeanne Dufort: And much to my surprise, each of those four ways resulted in a different, what I’ll call, warning message from the scanner. The way precinct scanners are designed, they presume a voter standing in front of them, casting a ballot and they’re designed to give you a warning if there’s something irregular about your ballot, if there’s a race that you haven’t voted in, or if it detects an over vote, or even if it detects something, it can’t figure out. It’ll give you a warning message and spit that ballot back out to you and give you a chance to fix it but it’s telling you what’s wrong with it.

Emily Levy: And it’s also supposed to be designed to be able to read a ballot, any of those four ways that it’s fitting.

Jeanne Dufort: Absolutely. It is supposed to be able to read them any of those four ways. And until I got into the weeds on this, I really expected that any of those four ways it would read it the same way. And that was the shocking thing. When I couldn’t get four of the same results out of the four different ways, I decided to then –

Emily Levy: You got four different results, right? Not just –

Jeanne Dufort: I got four different results. That’s right. I got four different results. And I decided to take each of the ways and put it through five consecutive times. Five times, times four ways, seeking to understand, would it at least give me the same answer, always the same feeding direction? And much to my surprise, in no one of those ways did it ever give the same answer five times in a row. And that was really shocking to me.

Emily Levy: And so tell me what the implications of that are.

Jeanne Dufort: Implications of that are the voter doesn’t know how their vote is going to be counted. It’s just as simple as that. And if you can’t know how your ballot will be counted compared to what it looks like when it leaves your hands, that is disenfranchising.

Emily Levy: And so you said that it’s different error messages, not different ways that the ballot was counted. Is that right?

Jeanne Dufort: Correct. The precinct scanner doesn’t tell you in an affirmative way, what it counted for your particular ballot. It just tells you what the problems are.

Emily Levy: Okay. We know that it isn’t reading it the same way each time, it could still be counting the votes the same way each time, but it sure isn’t reassuring that it is. And it very well might not be.

Jeanne Dufort: It might be counting them, but it also might be not. There’s this documented problem with the scanners I’m seeing, but deciding that a particular mark is not a vote. The scanners, basically making a decision that a mark is not a vote. And if it makes that determination, it’s not going to give you a message. It’s just going to determine it’s not a vote and go through and not count it.

Emily Levy: It’s so disturbing. Let’s talk a little bit. There’s two other things that I want to touch on here. And the first one is, since the general election, we have seen in many places, including notably in Georgia, a new group of people who are concerned about the electronic voting systems. Those being Republicans who have been challenging the Republican secretary of state, saying they don’t trust the system. At the time we’re recording this, threatening to boycott the run-off elections.

Emily Levy: And I’m wondering kind of what insight you have about how this … even though the work is non-partisan, it’s often people who are progressive, regardless of what party they are a member of, or if they’re independent voters who have been pushing this cause of getting rid of the electronic voting systems. Now we have people who are on the right also concerned. And I’m wondering what your thoughts are about how we can best use their concern to help further the cause of transparent and secure voting systems.

Jeanne Dufort: Sure. For sure, in our upcoming legislative session in Georgia, for example, it’s likely that there will be legislation proposed about elections. We are certainly hoping to channel this concern into a serious look at what we have documented are the legitimate concerns about the possibility that the system will not reflect the correct vote. At the heart of it, everyone wants to know their vote was counted as cast.

Jeanne Dufort: Now we could be cynical and say that this new excitement is based on the shock that the result came out, not the way some people supposed, but in the end where that’s coming from is they feel like some votes might’ve been counted that weren’t real votes and maybe some of their real votes weren’t counted. It really comes down to the same thing. Everybody wants to have confidence. We feel like if we can partner with them on the fundamental shared value of wanting all legitimate votes to count that we may be able to help bring the change about we want legislatively even in Georgia.

Emily Levy: That’s exciting. And I would love to see that too. And so let’s look at the upcoming Senate runoff, which is going to have the whole country’s attention on it. And I’m wondering what your thoughts are about the most important ways that you, who are on the ground in Georgia, can protect the election to make sure that the results reflect the will of the voters accurately. And also, what can people do who are far away and want to support.

Jeanne Dufort: If you’re far away, I would say one thing is if you’re far away, be very cautious about what voices you elevate. One of the challenges we’re living with right now is with the awareness of Georgia elections. The Georgia Senate race in everybody’s mind is folks who are wandering into it new are elevating voices of what I’ll call non reason. We’re putting out a lot of fires in Georgia right now, based on some inaccurate information is being passed around.

Jeanne Dufort: One, if you’re new to it, don’t make a lot of noise until you understand it really well. There’s some amazing organizations that are working on getting voters to turn out. I think one of the dangers of special elections is that no matter which party you’re affiliated with, one of the dangers of special elections is that only the most hardcore supporters generally turn out. And I happen to believe that we best decide elections in America and everybody votes.

Jeanne Dufort: There are some proven groups in Georgia that have been working on the ground to help marginal communities and communities that typically don’t vote a lot in special elections so you can seek out and help some of those groups to do their groundwork of making sure that everybody in Georgia understands there’s an election and you can vote, and here’s how to vote.

Emily Levy: And so people even far away can do that with text banks and phone banks and postcard writing, and people on the ground in Georgia have the additional options of going door-to-door, participating in, get at the vote events around the state.

Jeanne Dufort: That’s right. And we have seen through the audit, we just concluded it’s already starting with the recount that we’re starting today. With the scrutiny comes some more vigilante type groups. And there are some groups making a lot of what I’ll call bad noise. We have to understand our election directors at the local level, 159 counties worth of election directors and staff have been working insanely hard since early October on this. And they’ve had some extra burdens due to the audit that turned into a full hand count, the recount that’s going on now.

Jeanne Dufort: Oh my gosh. And Athens-Clarke, just to the north of me, they are literally running early voting right now for a special election that is on Tuesday. And they’re having to start today, this recount requested and legally authorized by law by the Trump campaign and they’re having to prepare for the beginning of early voting for the Senate runoff on the 14th of December. The burden on them is really –

Emily Levy: That’s more complicated than I think a lot of people realize because you have things … I mean for all kinds of reasons, including that if the same equipment is going to be used, it can’t necessarily be reprogrammed for the next election while it’s being used for a current election.

Jeanne Dufort: Yeah, a good example of that is the special instructions for the counties, and there’s about five of them, I think, that are running these special elections on Tuesday that they have to complete their recount of the presidential election before they can start to scan any ballots for their Tuesday election. Right? Everybody else just finished doing their work by the end of the day, Wednesday. They’ve got to complete it before they can start counting for an election that’s on Tuesday.

Jeanne Dufort: It’s a crazy burden on the local election folks. And so in that kind of a climate or where mistakes will get made but in a suspicious climate, when mistakes are made, they can get confused as conspiracy by conspiracy nuts. The noise gets even louder. The scrutiny gets louder. It’s tough.

Emily Levy: And I think that brings up the important point that because there’s a lot of bad noise happening, to use your phrase, that people who really understand about election protection showing up and helping … Well, signing up to show up and help observe and be able to document these procedures were followed. These things were done right. And to stand by the overworked election officials when they have unsubstantiated accusations hurled at them is really important part of the work.

Jeanne Dufort: That’s right. I mean, I was so pleased when I saw the map light up for the project. The poll tape project that Scrutineers were involved in and SMART Elections was involved in. The Georgia map lit up like crazy on that national map because of the work Coalition has been doing for several elections now. We had a running start on the poll tape project, and that’s a really important piece of this that only people on the ground can do, but that helps spot problems before they turn into big problems.

Emily Levy: And it’s also something that someone could if they were willing to travel to Georgia, but didn’t have official capacity to be a monitor or a poll worker, et cetera, could be doing is preparing to photograph poll tapes that are posted outside the polling places on election night or the next morning, because that’s a check against the later counts that emerge at the county level. That’s something people can participate in as well.

Emily Levy: And I know Scrutineers is going to be doing everything we can as an organization to protect the elections and to continue to support the Coalition for Good Governance’s work on the ground. I want to really encourage people to go to your website. Do you want to give the URL?

Jeanne Dufort: Coalition for Good Governance dot org.

Emily Levy: Coalition for Good Governance dot org. And we’ll put that in the show notes as well. Please support them in every way you can. You’re on Twitter and the Twitter handle. It’s at @CoalitionGoodGv. @CoalitionGoodGv is the coalition for good governance’s Twitter handle. You can follow them there. Any place else that they’ll find you online?

Jeanne Dufort: We’re also on Facebook. If you just type in Coalition for Good Governance, you’ll find us on Facebook. You also find Friends of Coalition of Good Governance on Facebook. That’s another place to start.

Emily Levy: Is there anything else you want to say before we wind up?

Jeanne Dufort: Thank you for the conversation. Thank you for the work you’re doing with Scrutineers. It’s unbelievably helpful to have a nationwide network of folks who are all kind of sharing the same core value that let’s have fair elections.

Emily Levy: Absolutely. And I want to thank you and everyone you work with at CGG for your amazing, ongoing, I won’t say tireless work because I think it’s tiring work, but persistence for your persistence and your dedication to fair and transparent and secure elections throughout the state.

Emily Levy: Thank you, Jeanne Dufort so much for being with us today.

Jeanne Dufort: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Emily Levy: You can find the rough transcripts of each episode at whowhatwhy.org/podcast. You’re invited to get involved in the election protection movement by joining scrutineers@scrutineers.org. That’s S-C-R-U-T-I-N-E-E-R-S dot O-R-G. Whether you’re a seasoned activist or advocate, or have never before worked for social justice, you are welcome.

Emily Levy: Both Who, What, Why, and Scrutineers depend on your support to keep our work going. If you appreciate what we do, please donate through our websites. You’ll find Who, What, Why at whowhatwhy.org/donate. Remember to check your voter registration and help others do the same, and vote in every election. Thanks for listening.

Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from New Jersey National Guard / Flickr, Jeanne Dufort, and Scrutineers.

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