Legal battles with election security implications raged across the country over the holiday weekend, even with early voting well underway at historic levels in many states.
In no state did those two things coincide more than in Georgia. Peach State voters amassed in lines marked by reports of 10-hour waits on Tuesday, following two key court rulings.
Northern District of Georgia Judge Amy Totenberg on Sunday denied a bid to scuttle touch screen voting machines over cybersecurity vulnerabilities. On Monday, she also denied a request to require a specific number of emergency ballots to be on hand at Georgia polling sites.
The ruling Sunday represented a setback for election integrity advocates who contend that Georgia’s machines have not been secure enough, and still aren’t.
Totenberg ruled last year that Georgia must phase out its existing paperless voting machines, citing doubts about cybersecurity safeguards for direct-recording election equipment tabulations that couldn’t be audited without a paper record. But the plaintiffs contended that Georgia’s replacement ballot-marking devices, which print out scannable paper records, aren’t as secure as hand-marked ballots, either.
In the Sunday ruling, Totenberg wrote that there were still “fundamental deficits and exposure” in the Georgia system, and that the plaintiffs “have put on a strong case they may prevail on the merits at some future juncture.” But she wrote that the state ..
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