Local Republicans and Democrats alike want to see Georgia election officials return to hand-marked ballots, citing the need for a paper trail that shows a voter’s intent.

In a petition submitted to the State Election Board (SEB) for consideration during its Aug. 6 meeting, Morgan County Democratic Party Chairwoman Jeanne Dufort urged the state to use the Dominion 5.5-A version voting system “in its standard configuration — hand marked ballots tabulated by precinct and central scanners, reserving the ICX touchscreen units for voters who need assistive technology.”

Dufort explained to The Federalist that the paper ballots would still be “scanned like normal. The only component that changes is in the voting station. … The voter will be handed a paper ballot and a sharpie and they will mark their ballot before going over to a scanner and everything else will flow in the exact same way it has in elections since we adopted the system.”

“The only change is how the ballot is marked,” Dufort said.

Currently, voters mark their ballot on a touchscreen before a print-out summary and QR code of their vote is created.

Prior to adopting the current system, the state used a DRE system, which stands for direct-recording electronic machines. 

“We were using a ballot-less system called a DRE system…where you mark your ballot on a tablet and then there wasn’t any physical ballot created, it kind of just went into a black hole on the computer,” Dufort told The Federalist. “So that was a very bad practice, not having physical evidence of your vote.”

Judge Amy Totenberg ruled in Curling v. Raffensperger in 2019 the DRE machines must be phased out. The machines did not produce a paper record of votes cast, though Totenberg stopped short of mandating the state revert to hand-marked ballots entirely. 

In response, Georgia switched to a system that uses a ballot-marking device (BMD) where voters cast their vote on a touchscreen and then a paper record showing a summary and QR code is printed out and tabulated. 

Now that system has been challenged in court, in the latest chapter of the same Curling v. Raffensperger case. Judge Totenberg heard from the parties in January, but six months later, she has yet to issue a ruling as Election Day approaches.

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The problem with the current system is that the machine “interprets your vote and sends it to a printer,” Dufort testified during January testimony in that case, meaning that the voter’s intention can only be inferred by whatever summary and QR code is printed. But printouts don’t always get it right. In Northampton County, Pennsylvania in November, voters who voted “yes” when asked whether two state judges should be retained for another 10-year term had their votes flipped to “no” on the printouts and vice versa. Voters noticed the discrepancy on the printed summary. Election officials said the issue — which was estimated to have affected more than 300 machines — merely caused the wrong vote to appear on the printouts but did not affect the recorded vote.

While Northampton County used different machines, it’s the potential for issues like what happened there that have Republicans and Democrats in the Peach State demanding a return to paper ballots so that there is a paper record of a voter’s true intentions.

Dufort told The Federalist she wants the State Elections Board to deem the current system “infeasible,” to avoid a scenario in which the only “paper-record” of a voter’s intention is one the computer makes. 

Under Georgia law, should the “use of voting equipment” be deemed “impossible or impracticable,”  the state may revert to using hand-marked ballots. Dufort, in an email to the State Election Board, argues the current system is “infeasible” given “known unmitigated vulnerabilities.” Switching to hand-marked ballots, according to the petition from Dufort and the Coalition for Good Governance, would mitigate risks to election security by creating a paper trail. 

“We should never go all in on these touch screens for multiple reasons, but this petition is about risks that came up and got confirmed after the 2020 election,” Dufort said. 

Former Democrat Rep. John Barrow also sent a letter to the SEB on Monday urging the board to revert to hand-marked ballots as well, arguing the current system may not be “tamperproof” and emphasizing the need for a “paper trail.”

“The inability to certify that the ballots that are counted by machine on Election Day actually reflect the choice of the voter … is sufficient to require that this Board fulfill its duty to mandate that paper ballots be used,” says Barrow’s letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Federalist.

The Morgan County GOP did not return The Federalist’s request for comment, but Cobb County Republican Chairwoman Salleigh Grubbs told The Federalist she supports using paper ballots as well. 

“We have not had the machines updated with the security patches, it was too late to do it, Raffensperger said that. He has chosen not to do the things that needed to be done to secure the election so from that perspective, I support paper ballots,” Grubbs said.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was informed of vulnerabilities to the current system in July of 2021 but said the state could not make the necessary security changes until after the November 2024 election. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a report in 2022 acknowledging “vulnerabilities affecting versions of the Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite ImageCast X, which is an in-person voting system used to allow voters to mark their ballot.”

CISA continued that the vulnerabilities “present risks that should be mitigated as soon as possible,” but said the agency had “no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in any elections.”

A group of cybersecurity experts sent a letter to Raffensperger and the SEB in September of 2022 arguing that the state must have a “reliable, trustworthy record of each voter’s selections.”

“This provides ground truth of voter intent,” the letter states. “Having a trustworthy physical record of voter intent allows administrators to check and confirm that the vote tabulation is correct, and to catch and correct any errors that may have occurred — regardless of their source.”

University of Michigan computer science professor J. Alex Halderman, who served as an expert witness in Curling v. Raffensperger, testified that there are vulnerabilities with the current ballot-marking device software. The group of cybersecurity experts referenced Halderman’s findings in their letter, writing Halderman discovered that “malware could make the BMD print incorrect votes and spread silently to other voting machines and the central election management system in the county.”