Judge in long-running lawsuit declines to block the use of Georgia’s voting system

ATLANTA (AP) — A federal judge has declined to block the use of Georgia’s electronic voting system in a long-running lawsuit alleging that the system is vulnerable to attack and has operational issues that could deprive voters of their constitutional rights.

U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg found that the activists and individual voters who challenged the state’s voting system didn’t prove that problems prevented them from voting, diluted their votes or kept their votes from being counted. Therefore, she wrote in a ruling Monday, they lack standing to sue, leaving her unable to consider the merits of their claims.

Georgia election officials have consistently said the system is secure and reliable and that it’s up to the state to decide how it conducts elections. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger celebrated the ruling as a “resounding vindication of Georgia’s elections.”

The ruling follows several years of intense focus on Georgia’s elections in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s narrow loss in the state to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Trump claimed without evidence that election fraud cost him victory, and his allies spread wild conspiracy theories about the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in Georgia.

The lawsuit at issue long precedes those claims. It was originally filed in 2017 by several individual voters and the Coalition for Good Governance, which advocates for election integrity, and targeted the outdated, paperless voting system used at the time. After Georgia purchased a new voting system in 2019, the suit was amended to target that system.

Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, called the lack of standing finding “a serious misinterpretation of the law.” She said the state should adopt hand-marked paper ballots for elections in 2025 and 2026 “to protect the integrity of our elections and restore public confidence.”

David Cross, an attorney for some of the individual voters, said the Supreme Court has long held that “the right to vote includes the right to have one’s vote counted” and said the ruling “vitiates that right.”

The election system used statewide by nearly all in-person voters includes touch screen voting machines that print ballots with a human-readable summary of voters’ selections and a QR code that a scanner reads to count votes.

The activists and voters who filed the lawsuit argued that since people can’t read a QR code, they are unable to ensure that what the scanners are reading accurately reflects their selections. They also asserted that it is burdensome for voters to have to check their selections twice: once on the touch screen and again using the limited information on the printed ballot.

They asked Totenberg to stop the state from using the touch screen voting machine system as the standard method for in-person voting.

“Although Plaintiffs have not ultimately prevailed on their legal claims, their work has identified substantial concerns about the administration, maintenance, and security of Georgia’s electronic in-person voting system,” Totenberg wrote. “These investigative and educational efforts have prompted meaningful legislative action to bolster the transparency and accountability of Georgia’s voting systems.”

In addition to other changes, a law passed by Georgia lawmakers last year requires QR codes to be removed from ballots by July 2026, though Totenberg noted that change requires funding and government action.

The judge outlined the evidence presented at trial in early 2024, including the findings of University of Michigan computer scientist and professor J. Alex Halderman. He testified that an attacker could potentially alter the QR codes to change voter selections, install malware on the voting machines and obtain passwords, among other issues, she wrote.

A report Halderman wrote in 2021 as part of this lawsuit prompted the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to publish an advisory in 2022 recommending steps that should be taken by election officials in places that use the voting machines Georgia uses. Georgia election officials decided to wait until after the 2024 election to install a software update to address some of the security flaws, saying they had taken other measures to secure the system.

Totenberg’s ruling ends a long and twisting saga. Throughout the process, she has repeatedly expressed concerns about the state’s voting system and practices and, early on, accused state officials of ignoring problems.

Conspiracy theorists and others looking to bolster Trump’s claims of a stolen election have seized on Totenberg’s preliminary rulings, as well as on Halderman’s findings. But Halderman has always made clear that his mission was to identify vulnerabilities in the system, that he was not tasked with looking for and had not found any evidence that those weaknesses had been exploited.