ATLANTA (AP) – Georgia is on track to have its new election system ready for the presidential primaries in March, lawyers for the state assured a judge Friday, but critics pushed for a more concrete backup plan in case things don’t go as planned.
U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg tried throughout a conference call to strike a balance between the interests of the two sides while making it clear that she does not consider herself a “guarantor” for the state’s election system roll-out.
Totenberg is presiding over a lawsuit filed in 2017 by election integrity advocates and individual voters who alleged that the state’s outdated touchscreen voting machines and election management system, in use since 2002, were not secure and were vulnerable to hacking.
The state bought a new election system last year following specifications approved by the Republican-led state legislature, and state officials have said it will be fully implemented for the March 24 primaries. In a ruling shortly after the new system’s selection was announced, Totenberg prohibited the state from using its old system past the end of 2019 and said it would have to use hand-marked paper ballots if the new system wasn’t ready by March.
Meanwhile, the critics who had sued shifted their focus. They challenged the new system, which includes touchscreen machines that print a paper ballot with a human-readable summary and a barcode that is read by a scanner to tally the votes. They argue it has many of the same security vulnerabilities as the old system and that voters can’t be sure that the barcode read by the scanner accurately reflects their selections.