Cybersecurity

Fearing Hacking, Georgia Advocates Want Paper Ballots

  • Group says voting systems is wide open to malicious actors
  • State says there’s no ‘Paper-Ballot Fairy’ to justify lawsuit
A resident returns an electronic voting machine access card in Atlanta, Georgia.Photographer: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg
Lock
This article is for subscribers only.

Georgia voters fearing Russian-style meddling with the U.S. state’s electronic voting machines may find out soon whether they’ll be going back to paper ballots in a November election with one of the nation’s most closely watched gubernatorial races.

A good-government group and several voters claim in a lawsuit that Georgia’s paperless system is at such great risk that the Republican-led state is violating residents’ constitutional rights by failing to fix the problem, even after Congress and the Justice Department flagged the system as ripe for abuse.