Democrats Disparage Election Integrity Grassroots Without Evidence

On Friday July 25, 2025, The Carter Center hosted an event called “The State of Election Integrity in Georgia and Beyond,” except that there was not one election integrity advocate, analyst, or recognized expert there to present critical views of Georgia’s elections.

Speakers were from a variety of groups, as well as “election officials and civic leaders,” some of whom often oppose election integrity efforts popular with grassroots activists.

The presentation was somewhat surreal, like carefully coordinated political theater peppered with appeals to authority, gaslighting, condescension, and even insults aimed at election integrity activists, and the worst of that came from Gabe Sterling, COO of the Georgia secretary of state’s office, who is also a rumored candidate for the office in 2026. I encourage you to check out the video of the hour-and-a-half event here, or an AI-generated transcript here.

I heard repeated calls for tolerance of differing opinions, but the speakers seemed to be “singing from the same hymnal” in support of the status quo.

There was no discussion of the Blue Ribbon Study Committee created earlier this year by the Georgia House of Representatives to examine numerous election integrity issues. Led by Representative Tim Fleming from District 114 and Vice Chairman Victor Anderson, Chairman of the House Government Affairs Committee, the committee has already held the first of six hearings across Georgia.

I heard nothing about Atlanta Federal District Court Judge Amy Totenberg’s withering critiques of Georgia’s Dominion Voting System in her various rulings. In particular, her Nov. 10, 2023, order in the Curling v. Raffensperger case expressed numerous concerns about uninstalled software updates, unencrypted QR codes, and major security vulnerabilities in the ballot marking devices.

There was also no mention during the event of University of Michigan Professor Dr. Alex Halderman who hacked into one of those ballot marking devices in the middle of Totenberg’s courtroom, or of the DeKalb Republican Party v. Raffensperger case where expert witness Clay Parikh disclosed the hard coded master password found in use in five Georgia counties. It is now being printed on t-shirts and other swag available on Amazon, Etsy, or Walmart.com.

I would have asked about those topics, but the organizers curated the few questions from the audience they accepted. Attendees were encouraged to write them down on notepads placed on each table and turn them in. Seeing no pads where I was seated with the press, I flagged down an organizer and asked if they would be accepting questions from the media. After checking, he said they would “at the end if there’s time,” but spoiler alert, there was not.

The low water mark of the event was a series of stunning and bewildering comments from Gabe Sterling. Here is just a sample:

“Now, most critics, I find, fall into that sort of Reagan level of description of, it’s not that they’re wrong, they just know so many things that aren’t true.”

“Basically, there is the voter suppression, voter fraud industrial network. It is two sides of the same coin.”

“If you have ten people, one person might be a dumb*ss. That’s in general. I’m giving some generosity on that. But if you have a thousand people, you’ve probably got about a hundred dumb*sses. And you have to find systems to work around them.”

The last voter file I received showed over 8.35 million voters in Georgia. Does he believe we have over 835,000 “dumb*ss” voters running around?

Sterling made no mention of the money being raised by the “industrial network” of groups hosting the event, but he did mention the recent decision to finally audit the voter rolls for registrations at PO Boxes, UPS stores, and commercial addresses — issues raised repeatedly by election integrity analysts and activists for nearly five years.

Aileen Nakamura, a “proud Democrat” and president of an election integrity group called “Scrutineers,” also noticed the lack of discussion of issues with our voting system. She said, “It seems they have closed off their ears to scientists and election integrity experts and would rather place their trust solely in legislators and election officials. I genuinely hope that a similar event can take place in the near future, allowing the scientific and academic community to present facts and evidence.”

Jeanne Dufort, Chair of the Morgan County Democratic Committee and member of Indivisible GA10, said she believes that as long as Georgia demands all in-person voters use an electronic device to mark their ballot rather than a pen, “our election outcomes will be vulnerable to manipulation and mistake.”

Marilyn Marks, another Democrat election integrity advocate and executive director of the nonpartisan Coalition for Good Governance, took aim at State Election Board Chairman John Fervier, saying he dismissed criticism of QR-coded ballots as a “ridiculous argument,” and falsely claimed there was “not one shred of evidence” that QR codes can be altered.

She added that as a defendant in the Curling v. Raffensperger lawsuit, he had “been directly presented with detailed expert evidence showing exactly how QR codes on ballot marking devices can be altered — accidentally or maliciously — to change votes.”

Marks noted that the evidence has been validated by a federal court. “For Fervier now to deny its existence raises a serious question: Is he gaslighting the public, or is he paying so little attention that he fails to grasp the basic facts about the system he oversees?”

Republican Bill Henderson, who was recently appointed to the board of elections in DeKalb County only to be rejected by DeKalb Superior Court Chief Judge Shondeana Morris said, “No input from anyone who might dispute the overall narrative shared by EVERYONE who was on the stage. Disgraceful.”

As the presentation was winding down, I received a text from State Election Board Member Janelle King who summarized the event in just five words, “This is an echo chamber.”

Mark Davis is President of Data Productions, Inc., has been working with voter data since 1986, and is a member of the Georgia Republican Party’s Election Confidence Task Force. He has served as an analyst and expert witness in court cases involving disputed elections seven times over the last 23 years, and has been invited to offer testimony before subcommittees of the Georgia General Assembly three times since 2020. Follow him @MarkDavisGOP on X.