Georgia’s 2002 election was ground zero for paperless voting machines, & the state turned blood red #RIPMaxCleland

By Jennifer Cohn Jennifer Cohn
November 10, 2021

I have previously written about the GOP’s questionable victory in Alabama’s 2002 gubernatorial race. But this wasn’t the only eyebrow-raising Republican win in 2002. In Georgia, the GOP unexpectedly defeated incumbents in both the US senate and gubernatorial races. Unlike Alabama, the voting machines were paperless, which meant that the GOP didn’t have to block access to the paper ballots to avoid a manual recount. Thanks to the state’s new paperless system, manual recounts were impossible.

The incumbent senator was Max Cleland, a popular Democrat and US Army veteran. During the Vietnam War, Cleland had lost both legs and one arm. He was also a recipient of the Silver Star and the Bronze Star for valorous actions in combat.

Cleland’s Republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss, had avoided military service with multiple student deferments and an alleged “bum knee.” A favorite of the Religious Right and Bush, Chambliss had been personally recruited by Karl Rove and Ralph Reed, who was the chairman of the Georgia Republican party that year. Like Jack Abramoff and Hans Von Sapovsky (whose work had inspired Florida’s faulty voter purge list in 2000), Reed was a member of Paul Weyrich’s secretive Religious Right organization, the Council for National Policy.

The Georgia Republican party — “backed by Karl Rove’s political machine” — launched a series of vicious attack ads against Cleland. One of them, according to Cleland, “showed Osama Bin Laden’s photo, Saddam Hussein’s photo, and my photo alongside, as if I were a terrorist as well.” As reported in Esquire, Rove had “called on an ambitious…