'It’s really embarrassing that this is still a possibility' — AI could exploit a flaw in Georgia's voting equipment and match voters to their ballots

Security researchers are warning that Georgia’s voting system has become more exposed because AI can now do much of the technical heavy lifting for anyone trying to exploit an old flaw. The problem itself is not new. What has changed is how easy it may be to use, and that has put fresh pressure on state officials ahead of the November elections.

The issue is about ballot secrecy, not vote flipping. Researchers say the flaw can let cast-vote records and ballot images be put back into the order they were cast, which can then be compared with other public records to identify how specific people voted. Georgia’s constitution says elections must be by secret ballot, and state law requires voting machines to preserve absolute secrecy. That makes the weakness legally awkward as well as politically ugly.

Max Springer, a Princeton researcher, said he fed a publicly available AI assistant the research and watched it reverse the shuffling of Georgia’s May primary ballot records. He said the tool then told him what else it would need to connect names to ballots. After he added early voting lists, cast-vote records, public audit logs and precinct check-in records, he said the AI could build “buckets of ballots and potential voters” and match most ballots to specific voters in the cases where ambiguity remained.

Georgia is not alone in using the same Dominion Voting Systems equipment, now sold and renamed Liberty Vote. But other places have either applied a software update said to fix the flaw or block public access to the records needed to exploit it. Georgia is the only state where the system is used statewide, and election security advocates say the combination of a battleground state, an open records law and unfinished repairs creates a bad mix.

State officials have pushed back. The secretary of state’s office says it is sending county election officials guidance to route certain records requests through the state and release only versions with sensitive information blacked out. It is also working with a vendor to scramble the original order of ballot images and cast-vote records before they go public. Critics, including Marilyn Marks of the Coalition for Good Governance, say that is too much about hiding evidence and not enough about stopping the traceability in the first place.