Five years ago, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg won plaudits from U.S. election officials for forcing Georgia to ditch its electronic voting machines because they were too susceptible to hacks.
Now Totenberg is weighing a similar order against the state’s new machines — only this time, a slew of election officials are begging her not to do so.
Current and former officials from both parties at the local, state and federal level argue that Georgia’s current voting machines are far less prone to sabotage than their predecessors — which didn’t produce any sort of paper record. But most of all, more than a dozen officials stressed their dread that ordering changes just months ahead of the 2024 presidential vote could undermine trust in the election, overwhelming local election officials and emboldening election deniers all in one breath.
Forcing changes so close to the November ballot “is a recipe for unrest and potentially violence,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on Georgia’s State Election Board, which is a defendant in the case.
The civil trial kicked off on Jan. 9 in an Atlanta district court and arguments are expected to wrap Wednesday. Totenberg — who will decide the case without a jury — is expected to issue a ruling in the coming weeks.
That means public confidence in the 2024 election in a key swing state rests to an unusual degree on this one judge — who must make shrewd judgments about the increasingly thin line between real Election Day risks and hyped-up harms.
And while fears of Russian election interference were high at the time of Totenberg’s earlier ruling, the stakes this time are much more concrete. The people and technology at the heart of the court battle are now at the center of former President Donald Trump’s continued allegations that the 2020 election was stolen.
Paper voting is a scaleable problem. Electronic voting machines are a result of corporate lobbying. There are hundreds of countries that manage to hold very reliable elections without these things, I don’t know why they are always being pushed.
When we had voting machines here, we always voted per mail. Since they abandoned them for security reasons, we go back to the polling stations.
I once was tasked investigating about developing voting machines. I could convince my boss and the person who wanted to pay us for equipping a whole country with voting computers that a voting machine can not fulfil the basic requirements for a safe, secret, and democratic election - it is simply mathematically impossible for it to fulfil the necessary basics.
