Election integrity activists want a federal judge to order Georgia to stop using its current election system
Election integrity activists want a federal judge to order Georgia to stop using its current election system, saying it’s vulnerable to attack and has operational issues that could cost voters their right to cast a vote and have it accurately counted.
During a trial set to start Tuesday, activists plan to argue that the Dominion Voting Systems touchscreen voting machines are so flawed they are unconstitutional. Election officials insist the system is secure and reliable and say it is up to the state to decide how it conducts elections.
Georgia has become a pivotal electoral battleground in recent years with national attention focused on its elections. The election system used statewide by nearly all in-person voters includes touchscreen voting machines that print ballots with a human-readable summary of voters’ selections and a QR code that a scanner reads to count the votes.
The activists say the state should switch to hand-marked paper ballots tallied by scanners and also needs much more robust post-election audits than are currently in place. U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg, who’s overseeing the long-running case, said in an October order that she cannot order the state to use hand-marked paper ballots. But activists say prohibiting the use of the touchscreen machines would effectively force the use of hand-marked paper ballots because that’s the emergency backup provided for in state law.
Wild conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines proliferated in the wake of the 2020 election, spread by allies of former President Donald Trump who said they were used to steal the election from him. The election equipment company has fought back aggressively with litigation, notably reaching a $787 million settlement with Fox News in April.
The trial set to begin Tuesday stems from a lawsuit that long predates 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individual voters and the Coalition for Good Governance, which advocates for election integrity, and targeted the outdated, paperless voting system used at the time.
Totenberg in August 2019 prohibited the state from using the antiquated machines beyond that year.
