Georgia election board will not immediately move ahead with GOP plan to fix flaw in election system

ATLANTA (AP) — Two Republicans on Georgia's state election board Thursday criticized a proposal by their own party to address a flaw in Georgia’s voting equipment that can allow voters to be matched to their ballots after they have been cast.

The software vulnerability does not allow votes to be changed or cast doubt on election results, but it could let someone see how others voted. That's important because ballot secrecy is a fundamental right under the state constitution and violations could create an opening for legal challenges.

A lack of ballot secrecy also can increase the danger of coercion to vote a certain way by family members or employers.

Last week, the Georgia Republican Party and Republican National Committee asked the election board to require county election officials to collect and shuffle ballots at polling sites before they are cast. That would prevent anyone from linking voters to their ballots by determining the time their vote was cast, the two groups said.

Janelle King, one of four Republicans on the five-member board, said during a meeting Thursday that such a requirement would impose new burdens on county election officials, including possibly having to hire additional poll workers. She also raised concerns about ballots falling out during the shuffling process and then going uncounted.

“I just have some major concerns about whether or not we are creating more problems while we are trying to address a problem that is an important issue,” she said.

Carolyn Roddy, who was appointed to the election board by the Republican Party, said she had previously opposed a similar proposal and did not see any reason to change her position.

She called the risk of coercion by family members or bosses a “small thing” that she didn’t think would affect the outcome of an election. The RNC proposal “does more harm than good,” she said, noting it would go into effect just days before early voting was set to begin.

Georgia is a presidential battleground state with one of the nation’s most closely watched U.S. Senate races this year. Early voting starts Oct. 13.

“I’m not saying that ballot secrecy is not important, but I think, ‘Cause no harm,’ is a great motto to take in this,” Roddy said.

Despite her criticism of the RNC's plan, Roddy said she also remains concerned that the software flaw has not been fixed.

Earlier this week, she and other Republican board members voted separately for a resolution that urges Georgia's secretary of state to upgrade voting software to address it and other vulnerabilities. The resolution also called on the board's executive director to seek help for the effort from the Trump administration .

The board's lone Democrat, Sara Ghazal, said it was too close to the midterm elections for a software update and that she opposed federal intervention in state elections. An election security expert, Ben Adida, told the board Thursday the state had already taken steps to reduce risks to the voting system and that a software update days ahead of a major election could cause bigger problems.

The ballot secrecy flaw in Georgia's voting system has received increased attention as Election Day has drawn closer. Under the state's system, ballots that display voters' choices and electronic ballot images created by the scanners that read them are randomized. But the equipment's software flaw allows them to be put back in the order they were cast, according to a report by researchers who discovered it in 2022.

With the use of other publicly available data, someone could determine the order in which people voted and then match them to the specific ballots they cast. Use of artificial intelligence could accelerate the process.

The board adjourned Thursday without taking a vote on the proposal by the RNC and the Georgia Republican Party, both of which did not immediately return requests for comment.