Judge Says Georgia’s “Vulnerable” Voting System May Be Unconstitutional But Can Stay Through Midterms

The electronic-only voting system is overseen by Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who’s running for governor in November.

A polling site in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 8, 2016. John Spink/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Late Monday, a federal judge ruled that Georgia’s electronic voting system, which lacks any paper trail, may violate the constitutional rights of Georgia voters. But the judge declined to force the state to switch to paper ballots before the midterm elections, which are less than two months away.

A group of voters and election security experts sued the state last July in hopes of forcing it to replace its old electronic machines with a system that provides a verifiable paper trail. Security experts have warned that the state’s antiquated election system is vulnerable to hacking and manipulation. The worst-case scenario is a hack that alters the result but cannot be detected due to the lack of a paper trail. 

Judge Amy Totenberg acknowledged the election system’s vulnerabilities in her ruling. “Plaintiffs shine a spotlight on the serious security flaws and vulnerabilities in the State’s DRE [Direct Recording Electronic] system—including unverifiable election results, outdated software susceptible to malware and viruses, and a central server that was already hacked multiple times,” she wrote. The state’s use of this system, she wrote, is likely to cause a “debasement or dilution” of people’s votes. 

Although Totenberg declined to force the state to switch to paper ballots this year, she did find that the state’s system is in dire need of an upgrade before 2020. The case will continue in federal court to determine what is required of the state by then.

Georgia is one of just five states that use only electronic voting machines with no paper trail, a system that voting security experts believe is easy to hack in an era of cyberattacks on our election systems. Georgia’s system is also the only one in the country that is centralized—using the same software for each machine across the state, downloaded from a single source. As a consequence, Georgia appears to be at particular risk of being compromised. 

The possibility of compromising Georgia’s voting system is very real. In August 2016, a security researcher named Logan Lamb began poking around the website that housed the state’s election system to check for vulnerabilities. He was shocked to find that its firewall was inoperative, granting him access to information on 6 million voters, including names, addresses, and partial Social Security numbers, as well as election officials’ passwords that could be used on Election Day to access the central server. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation revealed that Russian intelligence officials had visited the websites of several Georgia counties, as well as counties in other states, looking for vulnerabilities.

Though Georgia is traditionally a red state, its changing demographics have made it a target for Democrats in recent years. In November, there will be competitive congressional races in the state, as well as one of the nation’s most-watched governor’s races between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp. Kemp has served as Georgia’s secretary of state since 2010, and he is not only overseeing the election but also the defendant in the lawsuit over the security of the system he administers. “I don’t think there’s anything that Georgia can do to reasonably secure the paperless touch-screen machines that are in use today,” voting security expert Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan and an expert witness in the case, told the court last week. 

Totenberg’s ruling is an embarrassing refutation of Kemp’s oversight of the state’s voting system, although it’s not as harmful to his gubernatorial bid as if she had ordered the state to switch to paper ballots immediately. Confronted with the failures of their systems, Totenberg wrote, state election officials had moved “in slow motion” and “buried their heads in the sand.”

Matt Bernhard, a Ph.D. student working with Halderman, laid out the risk of a hack in an article on the website Medium on Monday: “It is quite possible that Georgia’s elections have already been hacked. Because the voting machines are completely unverifiable, we have zero chance to find out. No effort has been made on the part of the state of Georgia to investigate the impact of the vulnerability or to decontaminate various state voting equipment.”

Georgia election officials protested that switching to paper ballots at the last minute would be difficult. Early voting in Georgia begins October 15, less than a month from now. While Kemp’s office claims that the elections can be conducted securely and accurately, his office has conceded the need for reform. In April, Kemp assembled a panel of lawmakers and election officials to explore replacing the current system before the 2020 elections.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate