Georgia’s controversial electronic voting machines face their biggest test yet

A federal judge will soon rule on whether Georgia’s electronic Dominion voting machines are vulnerable to hacking, which could shake up the 2024 election in the battleground state.

ATLANTA — A federal judge will soon rule on whether Georgia’s hotly contested Dominion voting machines are vulnerable to hacking and violate voters’ constitutional rights, a decision that threatens to scramble the battleground state’s election procedures heading into the 2024 presidential campaign.

A sprawling six-year-long legal fight over the integrity of Georgia’s elections is scheduled to wrap up in a federal courthouse in Atlanta on Thursday, teeing up a ruling that could shake voters’ faith in their electoral system and further fuel unfounded claims of fraud on the right.

The trial is not about the massive voter fraud former President Donald Trump claimed occurred there in 2020 — those lawsuits failed in the months after the election — and no actual fraud or malfeasance has been alleged in this trial. Rather, the case is about whether the system is so fundamentally vulnerable to hacking and errors that it violates voters' constitutional rights.

A good government group brought the suit in 2017, well before Trump started blaming Dominion voting machines for his 2020 loss. Still, the trial — and in particular the testimony of cybersecurity expert J. Alex Halderman, who demonstrated a dramatic machine hack in open court — has been seized on by his allies on the right as proof of election conspiracy theories.

In 2019, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg barred the state from using its last completely digital voting system over concerns about the security of the paperless system. The state purchased and implemented the existing Dominion system with a whopping $107 million contract, which includes ballot-marking devices that allow voters to make their choices on electronic voting machines. The machines then print receipts, with plain-text summaries of the voters’ choices and QR codes that the ballot scanners use to count the voters’ choices.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/georgia-dominion-voting-machines-trial-rcna136275

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