AI Advances Sharpen Focus on Georgia Voting Machine Flaw That Threatens Ballot Secrecy

Security researchers are warning that a known flaw in Georgia's voting equipment, which could allow voters to be matched to their cast ballots, is becoming more dangerous as artificial intelligence tools grow more capable. The vulnerability has drawn fresh scrutiny from election security advocates, who say state officials have not done enough to fix it ahead of the November elections. Georgia election officials maintain they have taken steps to limit the potential harm, but some advocates argue those measures fall short.

The flaw does not permit votes to be altered or call election outcomes into question. However, it could allow someone to determine how individual voters cast their ballots. That matters because ballot secrecy is a right guaranteed under the state constitution, and any violation could open the door to legal challenges.

While the vulnerability has been known for several years, the rapid spread and increasing sophistication of AI tools have prompted election security experts to sound the alarm. J. Alex Halderman, a voting technology specialist at the University of Michigan who helped expose the flaw, described the situation as a wake-up call, noting that AI can now handle much of the technical work needed to exploit such weaknesses.

Other jurisdictions use the same equipment made by Dominion Voting Systems, now sold and renamed Liberty Vote. Many have applied a software update that fixes the flaw, and some states restrict public access to the records needed to exploit it, according to Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology. Georgia, a presidential battleground with a closely watched U.S. Senate race this year, is the only state where the system is used statewide. Lindeman said that fact, combined with an open records law that has allowed access to key documents, creates a perfect storm. He called the continued possibility of exploitation embarrassing.

Georgia voters use touchscreen machines that print paper ballots, which are then inserted into scanners to tally votes. The resulting cast-vote records detail each ballot's votes. Those records and the electronic ballot images created by scanners are randomized, but the software flaw allows them to be reordered back to the sequence in which they were cast, according to a 2022 report by the researchers who found the problem. Combined with other publicly available data, that could be used to match voters to their ballots, the researchers wrote.

Max Springer, a Princeton University researcher who studies AI and was not involved in the original research, said he provided that research to a publicly available AI assistant. The assistant was able to reverse the shuffling of electronic ballot records from Georgia's May primary and then identify what other records it would need to match names to ballots. Springer then gave it the early voting list for the counties he examined and the cast-vote record file, obtainable through a public records request. The AI created buckets of ballots and potential voters, and in many cases made it possible to match voters to their ballots. Where ambiguity remained, he obtained the public audit log for ballot scanners and precinct check-in records and matched most ballots to specific voters. Springer said AI coding tools are essentially supercharging laypeople to exploit vulnerabilities.

Georgia's Constitution states that elections shall be by secret ballot, and state law requires voting machines to permit voting in absolute secrecy so that no person can see or know any other elector's votes. A lack of ballot secrecy can make it easier to buy or sell votes and heighten the risk of coercion by family members, political organizations, employers or government officials. Such information could also be invaluable to political campaigns.

Gabriel Sterling, special projects manager in the secretary of state's office, pushed back on the concerns. He said it would be easier to use mail ballots if vote-buying or coercion were the goal, and that campaigns would likely find it cheaper to increase outreach to voters matching a certain profile than to try to identify voters this way.

State Election Board member Salleigh Grubbs proposed a rule at the board's August meeting that would have required the secretary of state's office to apply the manufacturer-recommended software update by Tuesday. She said each voter has one vote and no one is entitled to know how it was cast, adding that privacy protects more than the individual voter and safeguards the integrity of the entire election. In a letter to the board, an agency lawyer argued the update has not been certified by the secretary of state, implementation would take months and the legislature has not provided necessary funding. The board rejected the proposal. Some members said they did not believe they had the authority to order the secretary of state to act and raised concerns about the short timeline before the November midterms.

Board member Sara Tindall Ghazal, who voted against the proposal, said it is intensely frustrating that the update has not been applied. But she noted it is a felony to reveal how someone voted, which should serve as a deterrent. She said she hates that it is even physically possible, but that there are very severe penalties if someone were to actually do it.

The secretary of state's office sent guidance to county election officials instructing them to refer open records requests for certain records to the secretary of state's office. It will release them with the problematic information blacked out and decline to release other information and documents. Sterling said the office is working with a vendor to scramble the original order of ballot images and cast-vote records before they are made public. Halderman said that precaution would be necessary to prevent someone from reconstructing the order.

While some other jurisdictions have applied the software update that reportedly fixes the problem, others have taken the approach Georgia is now attempting by restricting public access to the records needed to exploit the flaw. Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, which advocates for election transparency and security and raised the alarm about the vulnerability, argued that withholding documents is not the solution. She said steps must be taken to ensure ballots cannot be traced to voters in the first place, adding that when Georgia's election records contain identifiers that can be used to trace ballots to voters, the only legal and acceptable answer is to stop recording that information rather than restrict public access to sensitive unlawful information to insiders and commercial vendors. With time growing short before the elections, Marks said a workable interim solution would be to collect ballots in locked boxes at precincts and then shuffle and scan them at a central tabulating center.