Georgia fails to make election security upgrades with midterms looming  | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This was supposed to be the year Georgia got election security upgrades in time for the 2026 midterms, featuring high-profile races for U.S. Senate and governor. Instead, election security advocates on both the right and left got nothing. Despite lawmakers’ promise — written into state law — to eliminate ballot QR codes, they didn’t appropriate any money to get it done. QR codes contain voters’ choices on ballots but aren’t readable by the human eye. Nor did lawmakers fund an upgrade to Georgia’s touchscreen voting machines that would have patched vulnerabilities in time for the midterms. And a proposal to switch to paper ballots filled out by hand will have to wait at least until next year — and likely longer. Read Article

Georgia elections bill dies, leaving absentee ballot drop off before Election Day intact | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Georgia House let an elections overhaul bill die Friday night, failing to take a vote on proposals that would have withdrawn the state from a voter registration accuracy organization and banned absentee ballot drop-off the weekend before Election Day. The bill’s defeat marks the first year since Donald Trump’s narrow loss in 2020 that Georgia Republicans haven’t changed state election laws. House leaders never called the bill up for a vote before the General Assembly ended this year’s legislative session. Instead, the House created a study committee to review Georgia’s touchscreen voting equipment, a possible switch to hand-marked paper ballots and voter registration accuracy. Read Article

Georgia election security lawsuit dismissed after 7-year battle | Mark Niesse and David Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A federal judge has dismissed an epic court case challenging Georgia’s touchscreen voting system, ending the seven-year lawsuit that uncovered election security vulnerabilities and a breach in Coffee County. U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg closed the case Monday but cited “substantial concerns” about Georgia’s voting technology, which uses touchscreens to print paper ballots. The case was a major legal test of Georgia’s voting technology, manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems and installed months before the 2020 election. The lawsuit alleged that the voting technology is dangerously vulnerable to tampering, hacks or programming errors that could change the outcome of an election. Read Article

Georgia Senate GOP muscles through election overhaul to allow hand-marked paper ballots | Stanley Dunlap/Georgia Recorder

A pair of election bills the Georgia Senate passed Wednesday propose new State Election Board powers, remove Georgia from multi-state voter rolls sharing databases and allow voters to request hand-marked paper ballots. The Senate voted along party lines Wednesday for the sweeping voting rules changes proposed in House Bill 397 as well as Senate Bill 214, which aims to encourage voters to use pencils or pens to complete ballots instead of electronic voting machines as is the primary option now. Sen. Sally Harrell, an Atlanta Democrat, cautioned against rushing through a significant change in the state’s election system at this late stage in the legislative process, which could result in further financial mismanagement. Friday is the last day of the 2025 Georgia General Assembly. Harrell wondered aloud why Republican senators rejected her amendment proposing hand-marked paper ballots when lawmakers voted in 2019 to switch to an electronic voting system. The state has spent more than $107 million on the Dominion Voting Systems that have been used in statewide elections since 2020. Read Article

 

Georgia Republicans backtrack on some election rules after sharp criticism | Jeff Amy/Associated Press

Georgia lawmakers are retreating from election proposals that could have allowed a Donald Trump-aligned state board to strike thousands of challenged voters from the rolls and would have required polling officials to count the number of ballots by hand. House Bill 397 was rewritten to remove those provisions before it was passed Thursday by the Senate Ethics Committee, sending it to the full Senate for more debate. The bill still seeks to force the state to leave the Electronic Records Information Center. Some question the funding and motives of that multistate group, which tries to maintain accurate voter rolls. But Georgia now would not be required to exit until mid-2027 instead of within months, as was earlier proposed. Read Article

Georgia is planning one of the largest cancellations of voter registrations in U.S. history | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia election officials plan to cancel about 455,000 inactive voter registrations this summer, one of the largest registration removals in U.S. history. More than half the registrations scheduled for cancellation were identified by a 24-state organization called ERIC, which reports when a voter has moved and is no longer eligible to vote in Georgia. The mass cancellation by the Georgia secretary of state’s office arrives as conservative critics of the state’s voter registration list allege it’s inaccurate and vulnerable to voter fraud. They say ERIC hasn’t been effective in finding outdated registrations among the state’s 8.3 million registered voters. Read Article

Georgia Supreme Court questions State Election Board on last-minute voting rule changes | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Georgia Supreme Court debated Wednesday whether the State Election Board went too far when it attempted to pass new voting rules weeks before last year’s election. The case tests whether the board’s right-wing majority had the power to require election inquiries and hand counts of ballots without laws passed by the Georgia General Assembly. While a judge’s order stopped those proposals from taking effect, the question remained about the extent of the board’s power. Justices on the state’s highest court on Wednesday often interrupted attorneys to ask whether the State Election Board has the authority to create new policies. Read Article

Georgia lawmakers keep election bill alive so they can change it | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Late at night in the Georgia House last week, representatives pushed through a hastily rewritten elections bill with little notice, less debate and no hint of its significance. This short bill is called a “vehicle” — a piece of legislation that can be amended to include very different election proposals, some of which never received a hearing or committee vote. House Bill 397, which passed the House and awaits action in the Senate, creates a process to remove members of the State Election Board. But Republicans might alter it to include ideas that did not survive last week’s deadline for bills to clear at least one legislative chamber, such as prohibiting voters from turning in their absentee ballots in-person the weekend before Election Day, banning last-minute election rules and a plan to withdraw Georgia from a national voter registration accuracy organization. Read Article

Georgia: ‘Trump asked for paper ballots’: State Senator files bill to remove electronic voting machines | Sarah Dolgin/Chattanooga Times Free Press

Georgia Senator Colton Moore A Northwest Georgia senator has filed a bill that would require the state to use hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots in elections. “I know many of you listen to everything that President Trump says, and you may have noticed a week or two ago, President Trump asked for paper ballots,” Moore said, “and I have a piece of legislation that accomplishes that very thing.” SB 303 would transfer the power to select and certify a statewide voting system from the secretary of state to the state election board. The legislation would require the use of hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots and require the absentee ballot scanning process to conform to the new system. It would also require the state to repeal any conflicting laws. Read Article

Georgia election board drops suit after group fails to produce ballot-stuffing evidence | Kate Brumback/Associated Press

The Georgia State Election Board on Wednesday voted to dismiss a lawsuit seeking to enforce a subpoena against a conservative group that was unable to produce evidence to support its claims of ballot stuffing in the state. Texas-based True the Vote in 2021 filed complaints with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, including one in which it said it had obtained “a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta” during the November 2020 election and a crucial runoff election for two U.S. Senate seats in January 2021. Investigators with the secretary’s office looked into the group’s complaints and in April 2022 subpoenaed True the Vote for evidence supporting its allegations. A lawyer for the group wrote to a state attorney in May 2023 that a complete response would require it to identify people to whom it had pledged confidentiality and said it was withdrawing its complaints. Read Article

Georgia Republicans advance a plan to leave a bipartisan voter data group, despite warnings | Charlotte Kramon/Associated Press

For years, Republicans echoing President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was ridden with voter fraud have pushed for states to leave a bipartisan group that lets officials share data to keep voter rolls accurate. Nine have, but none since October 2023. A new bill advanced Tuesday by House Republicans in a Georgia committee could make Georgia the 10th. Twenty-four states and Washington, D.C., are currently members of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which Republicans have questioned over its funding and motives. Officials use state and federal data from the group to identify and remove from voting rolls people who have died, moved to other states or registered somewhere else. Read Article

Georgia: Removing QR codes from ballots could cost taxpayers $66 million | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia lawmakers are deciding whether to spend as much as $66 million to remove computer QR codes from ballots or abandon the idea in favor of a $15 million software update. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asked a Senate budget committee Wednesday to consider the less expensive option for the state’s 6-year-old voting equipment, manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. “This change would help ensure continued voter confidence without drastically changing the voting system,” Raffensperger said. “There had been some reports that said if we could update the software, that any potential vulnerabilities could then be sealed.” Read Article

Georgia secretary of state wants easier access to immigration data to verify voter citizenship | Keely Quinlan/StateScoop

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Monday asked the Department of Homeland Security to allow states and local election officials to use federal immigration data to conduct voter citizenship verification. In a letter addressed to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Raffensperger requested that state and local governments be allowed access to data from the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program, a service administered by DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that allows government agencies to check DHS’s immigration records, for a fee, to verify the citizenship or immigration status of applicants seeking benefits or licenses. Read Article

Internet voting proposed for overseas voters from Georgia, but experts warn of perils | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Internet voting could be introduced in Georgia for voters who are members of the military or living overseas, an idea fraught with election security risks. Georgia’s election directors association this week proposed that the state Legislature study electronic voting during the 2025 session as a way to help international voters return their ballots in time. While voting over the internet would bring speed and convenience to citizens living abroad, critics and some experts say it introduces the danger of vote tampering if ballots are transmitted wirelessly. “It’s unsafe and unsecure,” said C.Jay Coles of Verified Voting, an organization that focuses on election technology. “It could be a completely different ballot that shows up at the election office, marked completely differently than the voter intended. It’s not far off to think that could happen.” Read Article

Georgia’s top judge wants to scrap partisan judicial elections | Rosie Manins/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia’s top judge urged state lawmakers Tuesday to end all remaining partisan elections for state judges, saying widespread efforts to politicize the courts are as concerning as the increasing attacks and threats of physical violence against judges. In his third annual State of the Judiciary address, Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael Boggs said proposed legislation to end the few remaining partisan elections for probate and magistrate judgeships in Georgia has the full support of the impacted courts. Most of the state’s 1,600 judges are subject to nonpartisan elections, but some probate and magistrate judges are still elected in partisan races, where judges campaign with a party affiliation like Republican or Democrat. Boggs said the politicization of courts impedes public trust and confidence in the judicial system. Read Article

Georgia: Rudy Giuliani avoids trial by settling with election workers he defamed | Nicki Brown and Katelyn Polantz/CNN

Rudy Giuliani has reached an agreement with two Georgia election workers that he defamed to settle the nearly $150 million judgment against him, in a deal that will allow him to keep his home and most valuable possessions. The settlement agreement brings to an end a yearslong saga over Giuliani’s false statements after the 2020 presidential election, when the former New York City mayor was a lawyer for then-President Donald Trump. Giuliani was about to face trial and potentially lose the Florida condo in which he says he lives and several New York Yankees World Series rings. He had been in litigation with the women, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, over whether his $3.5 million Florida condo is his primary residence and can be exempt from the women’s debt collection efforts. Read Article

Georgia lawmakers consider even more election changes after a smooth 2024 election | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Every year, Georgia Republicans pass new “election integrity” laws they say are needed to boost voters’ confidence since the close 2020 election. Now that Donald Trump won a clear victory, the GOP base is emboldened by his return to power and is pushing for even more changes to Georgia’s voting laws — this time, without the false claim that the election was stolen. From hand ballot counts to an elimination of no-excuse absentee voting, the Georgia General Assembly could consider a wide variety of election proposals during the 2025 legislative session. Conservative activists are also seeking to require paper ballots filled out by hand instead of touchscreens, stronger authority to challenge voters’ eligibility and new rules to certify election results. Read Article

Georgia appeals court strips DA Fani Willis of case that charged Donald Trump with election interference | Tamar Hallerman and Bill Rankin/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Georgia Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office should be disqualified from the 2020 election interference case, a bombshell decision that upends the last remaining criminal case against incoming President Donald Trump. In a 2-1 opinion, the court concluded that Willis’ onetime romantic relationship with former special prosecutor Nathan Wade merited her dismissal from the case. “After carefully considering the trial court’s findings in its order, we conclude that it erred by failing to disqualify DA Willis and her office,” Judge Trenton Brown wrote for the majority. He was joined by Judge Todd Markle. A third judge, Benjamin Land, issued a strongly worded dissent. Read Article

Georgia laws impacting homeless voters, creating election boards to take effect in 2025 | Maya Homan/Savannah Morning News

As the 2024 election season comes to a close, state lawmakers across Georgia are turning their attention to the start of a new biennium, which will begin during the 2025 legislative session on Jan. 13. The upcoming session may include continued focus on elections, as the State Election Board seeks clarity from the legislature on proposed rule changes introduced ahead of the Nov. 5 general election. Election bills passed in 2024 alone have already changed the way ballots cast across the state are collected, tallied and audited. Some election bills that were passed during the most recent legislative session, including HB 974 and HB 1207, have already gone into effect, but others are set to begin in the new year. Read Article

Georgia: Trump’s lawyers move to dismiss election interference case | Dareh Gregorian and Charlie Gile/NBC

Attorneys for President-elect Donald Trump asked a Georgia appeals court Wednesday to dismiss the Fulton County racketeering case against him because a “sitting president is completely immune from indictment or any criminal process, state or federal.” In papers filed with the Georgia Court of Appeals, Trump’s attorneys argued the 2020 election interference charges should be tossed because of “the unconstitutionality of his continued indictment and prosecution by the State of Georgia” now that “he is President-Elect and will soon become the 47th President of the United States.” The case has been stalled for most of the year as Trump’s lawyers have challenged a ruling that denied their request to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office from prosecuting the case on conflict-of-interest grounds. Read Article

Georgia: Hand-count election audit verifies Trump’s victory | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A hand-count audit of Georgia’s presidential election reported miniscule discrepancies from the machine count, confirming President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. The results of the manual review released Wednesday showed 11 more votes for Trump and six fewer for Harris out of nearly 750,000 ballots reviewed by election officials across the state. “This audit shows that our system works and that our county election officials conducted a secure, accurate election,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “they are the cream of the crop.” Read Article

Georgia: Dice roll kicks off randomized ballot audit of presidential election | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A roll of the dice Thursday at the Georgia State Capitol started a statewide audit of the presidential election, a human review of paper ballots to check results counted by computers. One by one, election workers and volunteers tossed 10-sided dice onto a table to create a random 20-digit number. That random number was then fed into a computer to pick sample ballots to be reviewed in each of Georgia’s 159 counties over the next few days. The hand-reviewed count will be compared with the machine count to verify the outcome was correct. Read Article

Georgia: Fulton County has smooth election night after previous troubles | Katherine Landergan/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Fulton County’s election operations were under the microscope this year after a heavily scrutinized performance in 2020, and by all measures, the county passed the test. Robb Pitts, chair of Fulton’s Board of Commissioners, gave his county a grade of “A,” and he said “the results of today’s election prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Fulton County was ready for the 2024 election.” County officials weathered dozens of false bomb threats on Election Day, but they avoided any major controversies that haunted them in 2020. The Democratic bastion came under fire that election cycle, when then-President Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, made untrue allegations that Fulton election workers were counting fraudulent ballots. Read Article

Georgia’s investigations into the election breach in Coffee County have stalled | Katherine Landergan/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Nearly four years ago, security cameras captured the moment that allies of former President Donald Trump walked into a South Georgia office where authorities say they copied confidential software and files that could be used to undermine the legitimacy of an election. Today, as Georgia approaches the eve of another presidential election, the fate of the Coffee County breach is still frozen in a state of limbo. So far, the only criminal charges in connection with the activities in the rural Georgia community have been filed in Fulton County, some 200 miles away. But that case, which also involves other allegations of election interference, has stalled. And although the state Attorney General’s office received a nearly 400-page report from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation more than a year ago, they have pressed pause. Election integrity advocates warned that the inaction sends a dangerous message to other bad actors who may want to tamper with Georgia’s voting system and undercut democracy. Read Article

Georgia’s secretary of state’s office stops election website cyber attack | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal Constitution

The Georgia secretary of state’s office stopped a cyberattack this month targeted at the state’s absentee voting website. A state cyberdefense team, along with the cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, prevented what is believed to be foreign hackers from shutting off the secretary of state’s absentee ballot website on the afternoon of Oct. 14, before the start of early voting. “We were able to put in an interface that says ‘I am a human,’ which immediately mitigated the issue and only slowed it down and didn’t crash the site at all,” said Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office. “Our tools did everything right. This was a win.” At the peak of the incident over 420,000 different IP addresses were attempting to attack the absentee site at the same time, Sterling said. He said the state’s election process was not interrupted by the attack. Read Article

How One Georgia Voter’s Mistake Turned Into a Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theory | Stuart A. Thompson/The New York Times

All it took was one mistake by a voter in Georgia to propel a conspiracy theory to nationwide attention and the upper echelons of Republican politics. Election officials in the state said that the voter, a woman whose name they did not disclose, visited a polling site in Whitfield County last week and used a touch-screen voting machine to cast her ballot. She mistakenly selected one candidate’s name when she had intended to choose another. The episode was over almost as soon as it began: The voter tried again, fixed the mistake and successfully cast her ballot. But online, the story quickly took on a life of its own, catapulted to prominence by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, and transforming into an elaborate conspiracy theory involving voting machines that were somehow “flipping” votes between candidates en masse. Read Article

Georgia judge blocks rule requiring counties to hand-count Election Day ballots | Adam Edelman/NBC

A Georgia judge on Tuesday blocked a new rule from the state’s election board that would have required counties to count ballots cast on Election Day by hand, a provision critics had said would cause delays and disruptions in reporting results in the battleground state. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his decision that the rule would be implemented too close to the election and that it would cause “administrative chaos” given the limited time available to train poll workers. “[T]he public interest is not disserved by pressing pause here. This election season is fraught; memories of January 6 have not faded away, regardless of one’s view of that date’s fame or infamy,” he wrote. Read Article

Georgia: County election board members must certify election results, a judge rules | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Certifying elections is a required duty of county election boards in Georgia, and they’re not allowed to refuse to finalize results based on suspicions of miscounts or fraud, a Fulton County judge ruled Tuesday. Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney rejected claims brought by Fulton County election board member Julie Adams, who voted against certifying this spring’s presidential primary. McBurney ruled that Georgia law requires certification and county election boards don’t have any discretion not to do so. “If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” McBurney wrote. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.” Read Article

Georgia: Republican-led group sues to block rule requiring hand count of ballots | Jeff Amy and Kate Brumback/Associated Press

A Republican-led group is challenging Georgia’s new requirement that poll workers count the total number of ballots by hand, saying it’s another example of the State Election Board overstepping its legal authority. Eternal Vigilance Action amended its existing lawsuit on Wednesday to also challenge that rule adopted Friday by the board. The group, founded and led by former state Rep. Scot Turner, a Republican, was already suing the board over rules that it earlier adopted on certifying votes, a step that finalizes results. One of those rules provides for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before county election officials certify while another allows county election officials “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections.” Read Article

Georgia: Judge dismisses Republican lawsuit alleging voting machine vulnerabilities | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A judge threw out a DeKalb County Republican Party lawsuit Friday that claimed Georgia’s voting system was made vulnerable by the public disclosure of security features and computer code. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee dismissed the case because Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger complied with state law when he certified the Dominion voting system as “safe and practicable” before it went into use in 2020. “Although applicant may firmly believe that the secretary’s current processes are ‘nonsensical’ and ‘appalling,’ and good-faith concerns over how to better secure our elections should be taken seriously, this matter is currently one that must be deferred to the policymaking branches,” McAfee wrote in the dismissal. Read Article