Atlanta – A federal judge has refused to block the use of the Georgia electronic voting system in a long -term demand That claimed that the system is vulnerable to the attack and has operational problems that could deprive voters of their constitutional rights.
The United States District Judge, Amy Totenberg, discovered that activists and individual voters who challenged the state voting system did not show that the problems they identified prevented them from voting, dilute their votes or prevent their votes from being counted. She wrote in a ruling on Monday that they lack position for Sue and cannot consider the merits of her statements.
Georgia’s electoral officials have constantly said that the system is safe and reliable and that it depends on the State to decide how to carry out the elections.
The ruling follows several years of intense approach to Georgia’s elections after the limited loss of President Donald Trump in the State against Democrat Joe Biden in the presidential elections of 2020. Triumph claimed without evidence That electoral fraud cost him the victory, and his allies spread wild conspiracy theories about the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in Georgia.
But the lawsuit in question precedes those statements. Originally it was presented in 2017 by several individual voters and the coalition for good governance, which advocates electoral integrity, and went to the outdated and paperless voting system used at that time. After Georgia bought a new voting system In 2019, the demand was modified to point to that system.
The electoral system used throughout the state by almost all voters in person includes tactile screen voting machines that print the ballots with a summary readable by humans of voter teams and a QR code that a scanner reads to count the votes. The aim is readable by humans only lists the election of the voter, not the names of other candidates or the details of a voting question.
The activists and voters who submitted the demand argued that since people cannot read a QR code, they cannot ensure that what the scanners are reading accurately reflect their selections. They also stated that it is burdensome that voters have to verify their selections twice, once on the screen of the voting machine and again using the limited information on the printed ballot.
They asked Totenberg to prevent the state from using the tactile screen voting machine as the standard vote method in person.
“Although the plaintiffs have not ultimately prevail in their legal claims, their work has identified substantial concerns about the administration, maintenance and safety of the electronic voting system in the person of Georgia,” Totenberg wrote. “These research and educational efforts have caused significant legislative action to reinforce the transparency and responsibility of Georgia’s voting systems.”
In addition to other changes, a law approved by Georgia legislators last year requires that QR codes be eliminated from the ballots in July 2026, although it pointed out that the financing and action of the government would be required to implement that change.
The judge described the evidence presented at the trial in early 2024, including the findings of the computer scientist and professor J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan. He testified that an attacker could alter the QR codes to change voter teams, install malware on voting machines and obtain passwords throughout the county, among other topics, he wrote.
A report that Halderman wrote in 2021 as part of this demand led to the Federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2022 Advance recommendation Steps that must be taken by electoral officials in places that use the voting machines that Georgia uses. Georgia electoral officials in 2023 said planned to wait Until after the 2024 elections to install a software update to address some of the security defects, saying that they had taken other measures to protect the state voting system.
The Totenberg failure ends a long and twisted path. Throughout the process, he has repeatedly expressed concerns about the voting system and the practices of the State and, at first, accused state officials to ignore problems. In an August 2019 failure, she The State prohibited to use their outdated paperless voting machines beyond that year. The State had agreed Buy new voting machines of Dominion a few weeks before and scrambled to implement them before the electoral cycle of 2020.
The conspiracy theorists and the people who seek to give credit to Trump’s claims of a stolen election have taken over Totenberg’s intermediate decisions in the case, as well as in Halderman’s findings. But Halderman has always made clear that his mission was to identify vulnerabilities in the system, which he did not have the task of searching and had not found any evidence that those weaknesses would have been exploited.
