The Georgia State Elections Board gathered on Thursday morning to address a newly demonstrated vulnerability that could expose how individuals voted. The meeting comes less than two weeks before early voting begins for a midterm contest that will decide control of the U.S. Congress. Officials expressed alarm that artificial-intelligence tools now make it feasible to match ballot identifiers with voter records, undermining a core democratic safeguard.
Max Springer, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, conducted a test using a $20 subscription to a large-language model and data obtained through an Open Records Act request. By cross-referencing early-voting lists with cast-vote record files, he claimed to reconstruct the voting order for roughly 1.52 million ballots, representing 98.9 % of in-person votes in 114 of the 139 counties he examined.
In response, outgoing secretary of state Brad Raffensperger ordered that any public release of tabulation data redact the ballot ID numbers after the election. Ben Adida, an MIT-trained cryptographer and founder of the non-profit VotingWorks, told the board that this step would “substantially address[es] this flaw.” The redaction is intended to prevent the AI-driven linkage demonstrated by Springer.
Georgia’s voting process records each voter’s arrival, then allows selections on a touchscreen that prints a paper ballot. Voters feed the ballot into a scanner for tabulation, and the machine assigns a unique identifier to each printed page. Researchers say the identifiers are not sufficiently random, allowing AI to pair the order of ballots with sign-in timestamps or even security-camera footage, thereby revealing individual choices.
State law creates a tension between two mandates: the Georgia constitution guarantees a secret ballot, while post-2020 reforms require extensive transparency of election records. Board member Salleigh Grubbs proposed a procedural change that would have poll workers hold printed ballots in a tray and shuffle them before scanning, arguing that Raffensperger’s redaction plan conflicts with secrecy protections. The suggestion was rejected by other members, including conservative Republican Janelle King, who called it problematic.
A similar software flaw was identified four years earlier, showing that Georgia’s voting system could already link identities to ballots. While many states using Dominion software have patched comparable vulnerabilities or restricted data access, Georgia has faced repeated requests,documented by spokesperson Robert Sinners,to fund system upgrades, which have not been approved. With early voting imminent, Sinners warned that the proposed changes are “a day late and about $30 million short.”