Georgia’s election board this week asked the Trump administration to intervene in the state’s voting process before the midterms — but members of the Republican-controlled panel later struggled to agree on how to protect voters’ privacy without disrupting the election.
James Mills, the board’s executive director, asked the Justice Department to prohibit Georgia’s use of widely used QR-code-based voting machines to count votes and to force the state to introduce an eleventh-hour software update to its voting systems before Nov. 3.
“I am writing in my capacity as Executive Director of the Georgia State Election Board to request the Department of Justice’s review and, where appropriate, investigation and intervention concerning Georgia’s voting system, ballot secrecy, preservation and access to election records,” Mills wrote.
The last-minute dispute puts Georgia’s voting procedures under immense pressure just weeks before Election Day. The board’s request for involvement from Donald Trump’s administration also comes as the president and other federal officials cast doubt on voting machines to crack down on what they call widespread election fraud.
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On Monday, the panel voted 3-2 to issue the letter to the DOJ, despite fervent opposition from two board members who denounced federal involvement in state election procedures.
But on Thursday, the board’s meeting further descended into chaos as members clashed over proposals to abruptly change the state’s election system to fix voter privacy concerns — including the last-minute software update and one proposed rule that would have poll workers manually shuffle ballots before scanning them.
“We cannot continue on the same path with these kinds of vulnerabilities,” Salleigh Grubbs, a Republican panel member supportive of the intervention, said during the meeting Thursday. “It must be addressed. It must be addressed before the November election.”
In Georgia, like other states, voters cast their votes on touchscreen devices that print paper ballots displaying their choices alongside a QR code that is later read by tabulators to count votes. The state’s Dominion system has already been certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and was cleared for use in November.
In his letter to the DOJ, Mills argued that because voters cannot read those codes, they cannot verify what the machines actually count. He asked Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the department’s civil rights division, to prohibit that method and impose a six-month deadline for replacing it, along with the immediate software update.
These systems have also been in contention at the federal level. Georgia’s request comes weeks after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin requested the DOJ investigate voting systems that use barcodes or QR codes.
The board on Thursday heard testimony from an election technology expert and a county elections director, who warned that additional hurried changes under consideration by the board could introduce errors, confuse voters and overwhelm poll workers.
Ben Adida, a voter software engineer and the executive director of Voting Works, told board members that the ballot privacy flaw is serious, but that the state’s existing safeguards “substantially address” the problem. He firmly opposed the last-minute system changes, asserting that the moves could disrupt the state’s election process and leave poll workers “uncomfortably” vulnerable to mistakes.
“The risk of the software update causing equivalent or bigger problems is quite high,” Adida said, adding that both proposals “present a very high risk to the proper operation of Georgia elections, and once again, they present zero additional benefit.”
Chairman John Fervier, a Republican appointee, opposed Mills’ request for DOJ intervention during the meeting, as did the board’s lone Democrat, Sara Tindall Ghazal.
“I have a fundamental issue with the federal government becoming involved in Georgia elections,” Fervier said on Thursday. “I just fundamentally disagree with it.”
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