Opinion: Five years is long enough – Georgia’s Election Board must enforce the law

For more than five years, Georgia voters have been told to trust a voting system that does not comply with the most basic laws.  The highly flawed touchscreen system selected by Secretary Raffensperger, and defended for five years by the State Election Board, simply violates multiple federal and state laws, although Raffensperger improperly certified compliance in 2019. 

This week, we at Coalition for Good Governance filed a formal complaint with the Georgia State Election Board asking it to do something it has avoided for half a decade: enforce the election law it is charged with enforcing to protect voters’ rights.  

This is not a demand to have the Board permanently scrap and replace Georgia’s voting equipment. And it is not a call for legislative action. It is a straightforward request that the Board follow the clear instructions the General Assembly already wrote into law for circumstances exactly like this. 

What’s the problem? 

Georgia uses Dominion touchscreen ballot-marking devices as the primary way most people vote in person. After five years of real-world use, multiple fundamental festering legal problems remain unresolved and ignored by state officials. 

First: ballot secrecy. 

Georgia law is unambiguous. Voting must be conducted in absolute secrecy. That means no one—poll workers, poll watchers, the press, or other voters—should be able to see how you vote. 

Georgia voters know the truth. Large, bright touchscreen displays make it easy to see how someone else is voting just by walking by.  Election workers have tried moving machines, adding panels, and rearranging rooms. Despite good-faith efforts, secrecy still cannot be guaranteed for voters, at all times, as the law requires. 

If secret ballots cannot be assured, the equipment cannot legally be used as the primary method of voting.  

Second: voters cannot verify their votes. 

Under Georgia’s current system, the actual vote that gets counted is stored in a QR code. Voters cannot read it. They cannot know which candidate is actually receiving their vote.  

The printed text on the ballot is not the vote counted. The QR code is. And Georgia has already seen elections where machines were mis-programmed and the QR code vote tabulated did not match what voters intended.  

Federal law requires that voters be able to verify and correct their votes before they are counted. And do so in private. That most basic standard is not being met.  

Third: basic required testing is impracticable at scale. 

Georgia law requires basic operational (not security) testing of touchscreen machines before every election to avoid mis-programming the recording or counting of votes. When tens of thousands of touchscreens are used statewide, full compliance requires millions of manual test entries, an infeasible feat.  

This massive labor-intensive work is infeasible but necessary for all touchscreens used. The federal court flagged this problem, asking the State Election Board and Secretary Raffensperger to fix it. Experts have warned about it. Yet nothing has changed. 

The solution already exists 

Georgia law already provides the fix for the voting system deficiencies that violate the law.  

When voting equipment is impossible or impracticable to use in compliance with the law, counties are required to use the backup system: hand-marked paper ballots counted by optical scanners. This is not a loophole. It is not an emergency gimmick. It has been part of Georgia law for decades. 

Counties already use this backup paper ballot system with no notice when machines fail. The difference here is scale—not complexity. What local officials do now in emergencies can be done at scale with preparation.  

The EAC-certified Dominion system (with limited touchscreen us) itself works just fine in this configuration as the backup system. In fact, this is how it is used in most other states: paper ballots for most voters, touchscreens reserved for accessibility needs. 

Why the Board must act now 

The State Election Board—not the Secretary of State, not the legislature—is the body charged with enforcing election law. For five years, the Board has declined to act, often suggesting that lawmakers should solve the problem, despite the Board’s duty to enforce the law as already enacted by the General Assembly. They have spent those five years in court as well defending the touchscreen system alongside Secretary Raffensperger.  

With spring elections approaching, May primaries on the horizon, and the vacancy election stemming from Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green’s resignation, delay only makes compliance harder. Acting now gives counties time to train, plan, and implement what they already know how to do. 

A call for leadership 

We are asking the State Election Board to do its job: hold a prompt public hearing, listen to counties and voters, and order compliance with the law—temporarily using the paper ballot backup system until the primary system can be made to comply with law.  

This is not radical. It is responsible. It is lawful. And it is long overdue. 

Georgia voters deserve elections that follow the law—not excuses for why the law is inconvenient.

Marilyn Marks is executive director of non-profit Coalition for Good Governance, the organizing plaintiff in the long-running Curling v. Raffensperger litigation seeking a federal court order against the use of the touchscreen voting system. Marilyn appears frequently on Georgia NOW’s ‘The Ron Show.’

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this contribution are those of the writer. They do not explicitly or necessarily reflect, nor represent Georgia NOW’s policy or views held by Georgia NOW or its parent company.