Touchscreen out, pen and paper in? Georgia trial could upend voting rules

A federal trial beginning this week in Atlanta could change the way people vote in next year’s election in a key swing state, and potentially affect voters in other states for years to come.

The trial, six years in the making, pits a non-profit organization and a handful of Georgia voters against the state, claiming that vulnerabilities in the state’s computerized voting machines place a voter’s choices at an unacceptable risk of being altered, infringing on their constitutional rights.

Georgia’s current system prints a ballot after voters use touchscreens on what is called a “ballot-marking device” (BMD), and the ballot has a barcode that a scanner reads to record each voter’s choices. Associates of Donald Trump hacked the system in early 2021, according to last year’s Fulton county indictment.

The solution, plaintiffs have argued since 2017, is for voters to mark paper ballots by hand – as about 70% of voters do in the rest of the country. The ballots would then be scanned and a tool known as a risk-limiting audit used to verify results. Judge Amy Totenberg will decide in the coming weeks whether to enjoin – or prohibit – the state from using its voting system, which would then probably lead to Georgia voters choosing candidates by pen and paper in next year’s election.

Less than 12 months from the 2024 presidential election, the trial’s outcome is “extreme and urgent”, said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a North Carolina-based non-profit organization and one of the suit’s plaintiffs. “It’s the ability to satisfy winners, losers and their supporters [in 2024] that Georgia’s election was legitimate and verifiable.”

Georgia is one of a handful of battleground states considered vital to