ATLANTA (AP) – A federal judge is considering whether to order Georgia to make changes to the way elections are run in the state with seven weeks to go before November’s general election.
Lawyers for election integrity advocates, who filed a lawsuit challenging Georgia’s election system, are asking U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg to order the state to abandon its new voting machines in favor of hand-marked paper ballots, among other changes. They say Georgia’s current election system does not allow voters to have confidence that their vote is accurately counted, which they argue is an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.
Lawyers for the state countered that Georgia has made great strides in recent years to update and secure its election infrastructure. The activists have not shown any real burden on their right to vote, and the changes they are demanding would be extremely costly and difficult to implement, especially with early voting set to start in four weeks, the state argues.
As a three-day hearing on the activists requests for immediate changes ended Monday, Totenberg did not indicate when she would rule. Questions she asked throughout the hearing and during the lawyers’ closing statements seemed to indicate that she was open to ordering at least some changes.
The lawsuit originally filed in June 2017 targeted the outdated, paperless, touchscreen voting machines Georgia had used since 2002. The state last year bought a new election system that includes touchscreen machines that print a paper ballot that’s read by a scanner. It was purchased from Dominion Voting Systems for more than $100 million.