ATLANTA (CN) — Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Tuesday applauded a judge’s dismissal of a seven-year lawsuit challenging the state’s electronic voting system as a “resounding vindication” of the state’s elections.
“This case wasted time, resources, and energy that would have been better spent serving voters. Let this be a lesson: Georgia will always stand firm against those who seek to attack our elections or erode trust in democracy,” Raffensperger said in a statement.
In a 33-page opinion issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg declined to block the use of Georgia’s electronic voting system but cited “substantial concerns” about the technology, which uses touchscreens to print paper ballots that include a human-readable summary of voters’ selections and a QR code that a scanner reads to tabulate the votes.
The plaintiffs claimed the ballot-marking-device system, manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems and installed months before the 2020 election, is vulnerable to tampering, hacks or operational issues that could deprive voters of their constitutional rights.
Raffensperger referred to the court challenge as “baseless attacks” by voting machine skeptics on Georgia’s secure, auditable paper ballot voting system.
“From day one, we knew these accusations were meritless,” Raffernsperger said.
“All the real-world evidence shows that Georgia’s paper ballot system works well. Our local election officials are professionals. And the voters of this state know that their votes are counted securely, accurately, and quickly,” he added.
Totenberg found that the voting activists and individual voters who brought the suit failed to prove the potential issues they identified prevented them from voting, diluted their votes or stopped their votes from being accurately counted.
“Although plaintiffs have capably, thoughtfully, and diligently pursued their opposition to Georgia’s use of the BMD system, the court cannot consider the merits of their claims without such a legally cognizable injury,” the judge wrote.
Meanwhile, the Coalition of Good Governance, a nonpartisan election advocacy organization and a plaintiff in the case, said Tuesday it was deeply disappointed with the judge’s decision. Executive director Marilyn Marks condemned the ruling for ignoring the presented evidence of security risks, calling it, “a serious misinterpretation of the law.”
During the 17-day trial last year, the voter coalition relied heavily on evidence gathered from University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman, who testified that a cyberattack could could cause specific votes cast to be swapped or deleted, including through access to and alteration of the QR code.
A report Halderman wrote in 2021 as part of this lawsuit prompted the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to put out advisory recommendations the following year for state election officials that also use Dominion voting systems. In 2023, Georgia election officials said they planned to wait until after the 2024 election to install a software update to address some of the security flaws, and that they had taken other measures to protect the state’s elections.
The concerns cited in the complaint over voters being unable to read the QR codes that appear on a printed ballot, did however, “spark real legislative change,” as Totenberg noted in her opinion.
A state law passed last year that would eliminate computer-readable QR codes from ballots by July 1, 2026, and instead use human-readable text for tabulation and auditing. But Totenberg noted that additional funding and government action would be required to implement that change.
“While CGG reviews its legal options — including appeal — one thing is clear: legislative action is urgently needed in the last days of the Georgia legislative session ending this week,” the Coalition for Good Governance said in a press release.
“Georgia voters deserve to know that their votes are recorded and counted accurately, and that election outcomes can be verified,” Marks said. “This fight is far from over.”
Totenberg’s dismissal order arrived during the final week of this year’s legislative session, where 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.
It also comes after President Donald Trump issued an executive order last week banning voting by bar code or QR code, except to accommodate individuals with disabilities.
The end of the long-standing case comes after years of national scrutiny on Georgia’s elections in the aftermath of Trump’s narrow loss in the state to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Trump claimed without evidence that election fraud cost him victory, and many of his allies spread claims that the Dominion Voting Systems machines used were to blame.
Many of the plaintiff’s concerns also stemmed from the security breach that occurred in Coffee County in the aftermath of the 2020 election, coordinated by Trump’s co-defendants in the state’s election subversion case.
But their lawsuit long precedes those claims. It was originally filed in 2017 and challenged the outdated, paperless voting system used at the time. After Totenberg ordered the state to update its aging election system, Georgia purchased a new voting system in 2019, and the suit was amended to target its vulnerabilities.