The Public Debate on HB986 Between Bill Sponsor Rep. Brad Thomas and Hank Sullivan Continues...

If the bill concerns ELECTION INTEGRITY, where are the provisions dealing with a tainted election?

Representative Brad Thomas, primary sponsor of HB986, came back to my last Substack, again commenting on my position against HB986. I thank the representative for continuing the discussion.

Rep. Thomas offered no thoughts, however. He instead pasted a link to a Peach Pundit article, which I post here:

https://peachpundit.com/2024/03/19/brad-thomas-takes-ownership-of-georgia-freedom-caucus/

According to PP, Representative Thomas now “ownes” the Freedom Caucus.

Hardly.

Aside from a few trivial remarks by the Pundit’s staff writer, the meat of the presentation is a video of the public hearing held in the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this week, in which Rep. Thomas offered an AI presentation impersonating Senator Colton Moore and Freedom Caucus leader Mallory Staples in a way that both appear to endorse Thomas’ bill, HB986, which of course never happened. In his comment on my Substack, Rep. Thomas was content to allow his link to speak for itself, offering no written comments. That’s fine. I am glad to respond to Rep. Thomas’ link, or Rep. Thomas himself, either way. That being the case, here is my response:

Thank you, Representative Thomas, for your comments. I watched the video up through Mr. Quinn's testimony. A question was placed to Mr. Quinn relating to the possibility that AI media could be used so close to an election that the victim of the "fraudulent" impersonation would have no time to react to it and an election outcome be affected. Let's talk about that.

The harm in such a case is not the impersonation. The harm would be that the outcome of an election would be affected. That being the case, where are the provisions in the law that the tainted election outcome would be set aside and a new election held? If this bill is truly about ELECTION INTEGRITY, both the perpetrator of the fraud must be dealt with, but even more importantly, the election must be dealt with. I'm not sure why we are more concerned about PROCESS, than we are about the actual OUTCOME. And I do not see that either of this bill's primary sponsors, either you, or Rep. Jones, have been champions of election integrity in the past, hearing not a whisper from either of you about the OUTCOME of the 2020 FRAUDULENT election. That being the case, I see very little moral or philosophical ground for either of you to stand so passionately to claim this bill's purpose is to protect against fraudulent election outcomes now and into the future. If one might consider the likelihoods of nefarious activities affecting the outcome of an election, 99% of those activities would be those carried out, or purposely ignored, by the government charged with the responsibility of holding a fair election. 1%, or less, would be carried out by individuals engaged in the kinds of activities addressed in HB986.

If you are saying that high-tech cartoons can be used to change elections, and would thereby constitute a crime, first of all, to prosecute such a crime one must be able to prove an election was changed. Without a body, a crime for murder cannot be prosecuted. Where is the body here? What are we doing about the body, the tainted election? Nothing. That is why this is a campaign integrity bill and not an election integrity bill. Because both of you have been forever silent on a fraudulent election that DID happen, and your bill does nothing to correct a fraudulent election should one happen because of the activities your bill makes a crime, what is the point here? Making it a crime to steal, do people keep stealing? Yes. In essence, what you have done in this bill is to create yet another avenue for the government to punish its citizens even when there is no verifiable harm done to anyone. That is not what our government needs to be doing. If the highest elected officials in the state can stand idly by while a presidential election is stolen, I don't know why we need to be so concerned about criminalizing individual, marginal acts by anyone and everyone who might sit at their computer and dream up one of these media pieces. Fix the government's role in election fraud first. Then we'll talk about AI.