Voters seek to renew challenge to Georgia’s electronic voting system

A federal judge tossed a lawsuit last year that sought to replace Georgia's use of QR codes to tabulate ballots.ATLANTA (CN) — Just a day after the midterm election, an 11th Circuit panel was asked Wednesday to revive a lawsuit challenging Georgia’s electronic in-person voting systems.Last year, a lower court dismissed the claims and concluded that a group of voters had not identified a “legally protected interest” impacted by the voting system because they could not prove it would result in their disenfranchisement.Following almost a decade of litigation, the voters and the Coalition for Good Governance, a nonprofit focused on election security, argued that decision improperly imposed an elevated burden on their challenge.“I think there’s merit to what you just said about the district court misunderstanding the law,” Chief U.S. Circuit Judge William Pryor said.“But we can affirm for a different reason, that the district court nonetheless reached the right conclusion,” the George W. Bush appointee added.The voters argue Georgia’s ballot marking device voting system burdens their voting rights by tabulating votes with a QR code.They claim they cannot verify that the ballot tabulated correctly reflects their individual votes and seek to replace the electronic in-person voting system with hand-marked paper ballots.But the state says voters are able to verify their choices, as the printed paper ballots also display a list of each of the voter’s selections for them to review before the ballot is scanned and tabulated.Attorney Josh Belinfante told the judges that even using a hand-marked paper ballot system would be rife with potential vulnerabilities.Their injuries are speculative and not sufficiently particularized and cannot be redressed by the court, he added.“I’ve been following this case for a while and I’ve been flabbergasted it has gone on as long as it has,” Pryor said.That is because from the very beginning of the case, it seems to be a complaint about a general grievance, the judge added.“Federal courts just aren’t in the business of saying, ‘we think Georgia could use a better election system,’” Pryor said.The case was first brought to the federal courts in 2017 and challenged the outdated, paperless voting system used at the time. Senior U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg ordered the state to replace the Direct Recording Electronic voting machines before the 2020 election.In 2019, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, purchased a contract with Dominion Voting Systems.But following President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020, the plaintiffs amended their lawsuit, claiming the new system is plagued with problems of its own.“This inability to verify vote accuracy for tabulation purposes is particularly harmful due to serious security vulnerabilities that plague the ballot marking device system,” the plaintiffs wrote in their appellant brief.During a 17-day trial in 2024, the voter coalition relied heavily on evidence gathered from University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman, who testified that a cyberattack could cause specific votes cast to be swapped or deleted, including through access to and alteration of the QR code.Much of their argument pointed to the January 2021 breach of voting machines at the Coffee County elections office, which become a crucial incident in the sweeping racketeering indictment against Trump and 18 of his allies accused of trying to overturn his 2020 presidential defeat.In response to these concerns, the state passed a law that would eliminate computer-readable QR codes from ballots by July 2026, and instead use human-readable text for tabulation and auditing. But the deadline was extended to 2028 to avoid interference with the state’s midterm elections.Pryor was joined on the panel by U.S. Circuit Judge Embry Kidd, a Joe Biden appointee and U.S. Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa, a Trump appointee. They did not signal when they will release a ruling.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads