The battle over voter confidence in Georgia’s election machines flared up after the Legislature decided last month to keep them until 2028.
Weeks after lawmakers voted to postpone their prior ban on the machines’ use of QR codes to tally results, the U.S. Department of Justice planned to surge into Atlanta with 260 FBI analysts. They were coming to help investigate the 2020 election, after the agency’s January raid of the Fulton County election warehouse to seize more than half a million ballots.
And the Federal Emergency Management Agency threatened to withhold anti-terrorism funds from states that do not start moving toward hand-marked paper ballots.
But the Trump administration also suffered a serious setback in its efforts to expand the 2020 election probe of Fulton, the most populous county in Georgia and a Democratic bastion.
A federal judge in Atlanta denied the administration’s demand for the personal information of thousands of Fulton election workers and volunteers.
The statute of limitations on any crimes in 2020 had long since expired, U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II ruled on July 7, denying the Justice Department’s grand jury subpoena.
Disclosing addresses, phone numbers and other sensitive information “threatens to chill participation in future elections, which will surely impact Fulton County,” the judge’s order said.
Ray decided the administration’s subpoena was unreasonable, calling it an “arbitrary fishing expedition.”
Fulton Commissioner Dana Barrett said the ruling by a judge who was appointed by President Donald Trump should put the 2020 election to rest.
“The conspiracy theory that the election was stolen and there was wrongdoing, that needs to now recede to the corners of the internet where conspiracy theories live,” Barrett said. “Go into the corner where the Jewish space lasers are and Area 51 and the JFK assassination.”
Barrett, who ran unsuccessfully in the recent Democratic runoff for secretary of state, said the Justice Department, the State Election Board and the “election deniers of the world” were using fictions about 2020 to sow doubts about Fulton and its ability to run clean elections.
She said it was a pretext for intervention in the county elections operations in 2026 and 2028: “It’s about trying to continue the narrative that Fulton County doesn’t know how to run elections and therefore either take that ability completely away from the county and put it in the hands of the MAGA-controlled state election board or put monitors in.”
The election board establishes the rules by which elections operate. Four of its five members are Republicans, and several are critical of Georgia’s electronic voting machines and of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who selected the system.
This week, the board adopted two rules, one banning the use of optical character recognition to tally votes even though the state’s election machines do not use that technology. The other rule would require that Raffensperger allow board members into his election center when county-level vote counts are aggregated on election night.
That rule passed even though Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr told the board it lacked legal authority to implement it, since Raffensperger was elected by voters.
The board also initiated a public comment process on a rule that would disqualify the current voting machines over privacy issues.
Salleigh Grubbs, the author, cited several concerns, including the “huge” displays on the machines.
Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat, called it a ruse to force election officials to use the paper ballots they keep for power outages and other emergencies.
Board Chairman John Fervier, a Republican, expressed a similar suspicion.
“This isn’t just about ballot secrecy,” said Fervier, who was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp. “It’s all part of a larger agenda to get to hand-marked paper ballots.”
Fervier said that if the current machines were disqualified over secrecy concerns, it would cause “massive” problems for election officials, who are already busy recruiting and training poll workers on the current system. Local election leaders have repeatedly said they lack the time to switch systems before the general elections in November.
The measure passed, setting it on course for adoption.
Democrats have been dubious about the ongoing assault on Georgia’s voting machines.
Two years ago, Republican lawmakers pushed through a ban on the use of QR codes to tally votes, which would have made Georgia’s current system illegal effective July 1.
But they failed to approve and pay for an alternative system, so Kemp called them back to the Capitol last month to address the looming deadline.
They postponed the ban until 2028.
Just before the special session, Democratic lawmakers from across the South gathered in Atlanta to strategize ahead of the special session. With them was Rep. Carolyn Hugley, D-Columbus, the minority leader of the state House.
“The QR code is a manufactured issue to begin with because a certain person could not accept the fact that he did not win Georgia,” Hugley said at that event, referring to Trump.
Raffensperger has consistently pushed back against his GOP critics, asserting that his machines are all but flawless.
This week, his office announced the results of a review of all 91 contests in last month’s runoffs. The audit of all 1,111,856 ballot images found 23 discrepancies with hand-marked ballots and none with the digital voting machines.
“We run elections with nearly perfect accuracy, and we will never stop reminding the public their machines are accurate, their counts are accurate, and that elections in Georgia are accurate,” Raffensperger said in a statement.
His office calculated that the hand-marked error rate would create about 3,500 discrepancies in a presidential election year with 5 million ballots cast.
The state Republican Party and many GOP lawmakers, dismiss such audits as window dressing, saying flaws in the system make errors difficult or impossible to detect.
The national fight over elections has taken a toll on voter confidence.
A PBS News/NPR/Marist poll in March found that two-thirds of Americans are confident in fair and accurate elections, down from 76% in late 2024.
Georgia GOP voters had a different take.
A survey in late April of likely Republican primary voters by the firm Cygnal had more than 78% expressing confidence that their votes would be counted fairly in 2026, with 28% “very” confident and more than 50% “somewhat” confident.
The poll was commissioned by the bipartisan Democracy Defense Project, which is trying to counter “false narratives about ‘stolen elections’” that it blames on a “proliferation of politicians” who are trying to bolster their own campaigns.
The project’s Georgia board members include former Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin. On the Republican side are former U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss and former U.S. Rep. Drew Ferguson.
Ferguson and Franklin appeared at the DeKalb County elections center during the runoff last month to push back against doubters.
They pointed to record turnout in recent years.
“What we have found is 80% of voters on a bipartisan level feel very strongly that the elections are being run fairly and safely here in the state of Georgia,” Ferguson said.
But the Democracy Defense Project’s own polling indicates lingering suspicion.
That April survey by Cygnal found that nearly 76% of likely GOP primary voters approved of the FBI raid on the Fulton elections warehouse, more than 61% strongly approving.
This story was provided by WABE media partner Capitol Beat.
