Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp plans to eschew advice from experts and replace the state's voting infrastructure — a move that worried the state's Democrats for risking election security. | Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images Cybersecurity Georgia likely to plow ahead with buying insecure voting machines The new equipment would replace the state’s paperless, electronic machines, which have also been criticized for being vulnerable.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is poised to sign a bill to overhaul the state’s voting system with machines that are widely considered vulnerable to hacking.

The new equipment would replace the state’s paperless, electronic machines — technology so risky that a federal judge said last year that its continued use threatened Georgians’ “constitutional interests.” But security researchers say similar risks exist in the new electronic machines that the GOP-led legislature has chosen, which would embed the voter’s choice in a barcode on a slip of paper.


The warnings from cybersecurity experts, election integrity advocates and Georgia Democrats are especially troubling given the abundant warnings from U.S. intelligence leaders that Russia will once again attempt to undermine the presidential election in 2020.

“The bill’s sponsors made false and misleading statements during the entire legislative session in hearings leading up to the vote, often flatly contradicting objective evidence or mischaracterizing scientific writing,” said Georgia Institute of Technology computer science professor Rich DeMillo, who testified throughout the process.

A Kemp spokesman declined to comment about lawmakers’ reliance on what experts called false information.

Kemp, a Republican who defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams in November, remains embroiled in litigation over the state’s old touchscreen machines from when he was the state’s top election official last year. He also accused the Georgia Democratic Party, without evidence, of trying to hack the election on the eve of the November vote.

Cyber experts say falsehoods filled the legislative debate on March 13, when the state Senate voted 35-21 along party lines to pass a bill authorizing the state to spend $150 million on the new touchscreen voting systems. The state House voted the next day to send the bill to Kemp. The bill now awaits a legal review, according to Kemp spokesman Cody Hall, though the governor is expected to sign it.

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Security experts warn that an intruder can corrupt the machines and alter the barcode-based ballots without voters or election officials realizing it. They say it is much safer to use scanned-in paper ballots that voters mark by hand, which leave a permanent and accurate record of the voters’ choices.

But the Republican senators most vocally supporting the bill repeatedly misstated facts about voting security and election technology, the experts said.

State Sen. William Ligon, the bill’s chief defender in the chamber, said the barcode devices and hand-marked paper ballots were equally at risk of hacking. That’s just not the case, researchers said.

“Hacking and configuration errors cannot cause pens to put the wrong votes on hand-marked paper ballots, but they can cause ballot-marking devices to print the wrong votes on the paper record,” Philip Stark, a statistics professor and voting security expert at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an email.

“I cannot think of a legitimate reason,” Stark said, “for the Legislature to spend Georgians’ tax dollars on ballot-marking devices for all voters.”

Republican Sen. Greg Dolezal, too, said the “hackability” of various voting systems was “uniform,” despite the widespread consensus from technical experts that it’s not.

Sen. P.K. Martin IV, another Republican, said there had been “zero” instances of hackers breaching Georgia’s current voting machines. But there’s no evidence that hackers haven’t tampered with Georgia’s current voting system — paperless machines can be hacked to prevent any signs of tampering — and the machines have previously generated results that prompted questions about their reliability.

Ligon said the technology of optical scanners was “pretty much the same” as it was in 2000, even though, as DeMillo noted, “imaging capabilities have increased by orders of magnitude in the last twenty years.”

“The bill’s supporters simply asserted false or discredited claims from the well of both chambers,” DeMillo said in an email. “They concealed relevant information and refused to recognize independent witnesses who could offer objective testimony and analysis.”

Sen. Elena Parent, one of the Democrats who spoke out most vocally against the bill, said it was “disappointing” to see on the Senate floor that “few if any of my Republican colleagues had familiarized themselves with the technology under discussion.”

“Their unwillingness to get answers to even basic questions about the technology they voted for is a dereliction of duty to the voters and taxpayers in our state,” she told POLITICO in an email.

Facing certain defeat in the final vote, Senate Democrats alternated between assailing the cybersecurity risks of the barcode devices and blasting how Republican lawmakers shepherded the bill through the legislative process.

Senate Minority Leader Steve Henson rattled off a litany of objections. The bill didn’t contain the legally required fiscal impact analysis, he said, thus “setting a terrible precedent.” The Legislature never heard testimony from neighboring states that use paper ballots, who could have dispelled concerns about that approach. The chairwoman of the Senate committee handling the bill announced its final hearing just minutes before the 24-hour deadline for lawmakers to propose amendments.

“We were not allowed to properly, in my opinion, vet this bill,” Henson said.

Henson also took aim at the state’s Secure, Accessible & Fair Elections Commission, which endorsed ballot-marking devices in January. As Henson pointed, the commission’s lone cyber expert dissented from that recommendation.

The overwhelming majority of other voting security experts also warns against ballot-marking technology. “We should pause today and reflect on that,” Henson said.

But Republicans were unmoved.

Ligon, who praised ballot-marking devices as “the technology of today built upon the experience of the past,” repeatedly demonstrated what experts called a lack of understanding about the cybersecurity implications of using computers to generate ballots, based on his comments during the Senate debate on the bill.

“If there is any discrepancy discovered in an audit between what the machine says and what the paper says,” he assured his colleagues, “the paper will control.”

But the paper ballot is generated by the machine and can thus be corrupted at the source, rendering a meaningful audit impossible.

Stark, who invented the widely recommended audit technique known as a risk-limiting audit, warned Georgia lawmakers about this, but “they ignored his warning,” DeMillo said.

During a colloquy with Parent, Ligon also denied (wrongly, experts said) that removing the ballot-generating computer — as hand-marked ballots do — eliminated the need for a voter to verify his or her ballot, despite this being one of the chief advantages of not using computers to mark ballots. (Research shows that voters using ballot-marking devices do not check to make sure the computer marked their ballot properly.)

“We are kidding ourselves if we think that people can remember the entire ballot,” Parent said on the floor. “Which means it is easy to have races added or subtracted through malware. It is just not hard to do.”

Critics argued that the bill appeared to be written with one vendor in mind: the voting technology giant Election Systems & Software, whose former top lobbyist is now Kemp’s deputy chief of staff. Henson said this created a clear “conflict of interest.” (ES&S spokeswoman Katina Granger said the company expects the selection process to be “fairly and highly competitive.” She added that lobbying “is a normal practice employed by all election vendors and is common across all industries.”)

Democratic Sen. Sally Harrell went even further. On the Senate floor, she said, “Don’t let Georgia get suckered by vendors who are thirsty for the biggest contract in the United States for what is brand-new technology that might not last the 10 years that we need it to last.”

Georgia Republicans largely declined to answer questions about the accusations that they are embracing falsehoods on voting security. Ligon, Martin and Dolezal did not respond to requests for comment. State Rep. Ed Rynders, a Republican who chairs the House committee that originally considered the bill, declined to comment on the process.

The only leading Republican willing to speak was state Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick, who in January was appointed chairwoman of the Senate committee that handled the bill.

“There’s a fundamental disagreement about whether machine voting or paper voting is more secure among the people that were voting on the bill,” she said in an interview.

When pressed on security experts’ concerns about ballot-marking devices, Kirkpatrick said the option for voters to review their printed ballots was a “safeguard” against corrupted machines.

“Do you not think that voters have some responsibility to review?” she asked. “I mean, these are adults we’re talking about. Does the voter not have any responsibility?”

Harrell told POLITICO that she was “not at all surprised” to hear her Republican colleagues saying inaccurate things about the technology they were approving.

“This process, from the SAFE Commission through the legislative process, has been driven by a foregone conclusion,” she said in an email. “Why take the time to understand the technology if you’ve already made up your mind?”

Some Republicans saw the voting-machines bill as a referendum on Georgia’s place in the nation.

On the Senate floor, Dolezal enthusiastically endorsed ballot-marking devices — “everything I do in my life tells me that machines are more reliable than my hand when it comes to marking something” — and criticized activists both in Georgia and around the country who have assailed the state’s recent history of voting controversies.

“Make no mistake, we’ve gotten some things wrong,” he said. “But the fact of the matter is, Georgia is on the right trendline.”

Harrell saw it differently. By approving ballot-marking devices, she told her colleagues, Georgia was “putting vendors before voters.”

