Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R), allegedly on the behalf of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, blocked state Senate legislation that addressed ballot chain of custody and would have placed a ban on private donations directly to counties.
State Senator Brandon Beach (R-Woodstock) told The Georgia Star News, “I don’t understand why the governor didn’t want us to address that outside money, whether it was Zuckerberg or Soros or whoever.”
The legislation would have routed “Zuckerbucks”-type funds through the Georgia State Election Board and established an accountability process for the counties, rather than the current system where counties can accept private donations and use them with almost no accountability.
Duncan refused to allow the bill to come up for a vote and Beach accused Duncan of doing Kemp’s bidding.
Beach referred to the inaction on the legislation as “horrible.”
He said, “There are still voters that lack confidence in our voter system here in Georgia. More work needs to be done.”
“If you think that Fulton County is going to take money and help Republicans, that’s not going to happen,” he added. “They are going to use that money to GOP disadvantage.”
Beach appeared on The John Fredericks Show to discuss the situation on Thursday. He blamed Duncan but also blamed the GOP Senate leadership.
“I will tell you Monday night was a disaster and I’m not going to blame the lieutenant governor totally. I’m also going to blame our leadership, Butch Miller and Mike Dugan waiting till 11:45 on day 40 to try to bring up the election integrity bill is wrong,” the state senator said.
“You’re not going to get that done in 15 minutes on day 40. We should have been bringing this up on day 37, day 38, and day 39. We should not have waited until the last 15 minutes of the session to bring up an election integrity bill,” he continued. “There was nothing more important than getting rid of the Zuckerberg money going to counties directly. I said this two years ago.”
Election integrity is something that Beach has been beating the drum on.
“I told my caucus between the November and the January election if we didn’t get rid of the drop boxes and make sure the signatures matched, if we didn’t do those two things, we were going to lose two U.S. Senate seats,” he said.
Beach told The Star News that he intends to bring up election integrity as an issue every legislative session until proper action is taken.
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Aaron Gulbransen is a reporter at The Georgia Star News and The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]. Follow Aaron on GETTR, Twitter, and Parler.
Photo “Brandon Beach” by Brandon Beach.
