In a 153-page order last week, Totenberg
ordered the state to stop using its outdated
system after the end of this year, calling it
“antiquated, seriously flawed, and vulnerable to
failure, breach, contamination, and attack.”
The petition and the amended lawsuit both
take issue with the fact that while the paper
record printed by the new voting machines
includes a human-readable summary of the
voter’s selections, the scanner tallies the votes
based on a machine-readable code. Voters can’t
be sure that the code on the paper accurately
reflects their selections, and meaningful audits
can’t be done, they argue.
The law Gov. Brian Kemp signed in April says
“electronic ballot markers shall produce paper
ballots which are marked with the elector’s
choices in a format readable by the elector.”
That means the new machines do not comply
with the state election code, the petition and
amended complaint say.
Also, the new system isn’t much safer than the
system Totenberg ordered the state to stop
using, the amended lawsuit says. Vulnerabilities
could cause the machines to print codes that
don’t match a voter’s selections, or could cause
a scanner to improperly tabulate votes, it says.
By choosing to move forward with the
Dominion system, the amended lawsuit
says, state officials “willfully and negligently
abrogated their statutory duties and abused
their discretion, subjecting voters to cast
votes on an illegal and unreliable system
— a system that must be presumed to be
compromised and incapable of producing
verifiable results.”