Georgia's State Election Board has asked the Trump administration to step into the state's election — weeks before voters go to the polls.

On Monday, the board voted 3-2 for a resolution calling on the Justice Department and Homeland Security to step in. On Wednesday, the board's executive director, James Mills, followed with a letter to the Justice Department. In it, as The Washington Sun reported on October 2, he asks the DOJ to:

• Prohibit Georgia from counting votes with the QR codes printed on its ballots, the method the state's voting machines use now, and give the state a six-month deadline to replace it.
• Force an immediate software update to the state's voting system before the November 3 election.

The letter went to Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department's civil rights division.

The system is already certified

In Georgia, voters make their choices on a touchscreen. The machine prints a paper ballot that shows those choices in plain text, along with a QR code that the scanner reads to count the vote.

Mills argues that because voters can't read the code, they can't check what the machine counts. But the state's Dominion system has already been certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and cleared for use in November, according to the Sun.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as Common Dreams summarized it, noted Georgia would have to revamp how it runs in-person voting to comply, since it relies on scanners reading those codes to count votes.

The experts said: don't do this now

At the board's Thursday meeting, an election technology expert and a county elections director warned against rushed changes.

Ben Adida, executive director of the election-software nonprofit VotingWorks, told the board the ballot-privacy flaw it was worried about is real, but that Georgia's existing safeguards "substantially address" it. He said the board's proposals — the software update and a plan to have poll workers hand-shuffle ballots before scanning — "present a very high risk to the proper operation of Georgia elections, and once again, they present zero additional benefit."

"The risk of the software update causing equivalent or bigger problems is quite high," Adida said.

Even the Republican chairman said no

This wasn't a party-line fight. The board's chairman, John Fervier — a Republican appointee — voted against asking the DOJ to intervene, along with the board's lone Democrat.

"I have a fundamental issue with the federal government becoming involved in Georgia elections," Fervier said. "I just fundamentally disagree with it."

Board member Salleigh Grubbs, a Republican who supports the intervention, said the vulnerabilities "must be addressed before the November election."

Part of a national push

Georgia's board isn't acting alone. Weeks earlier, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asked the DOJ to investigate voting systems that use barcodes or QR codes, the Sun reports — the same Mullin who has threatened to jail the people who run our elections. The president and other federal officials have been casting doubt on voting machines as part of what they call a crackdown on widespread election fraud.

Elsewhere, Republican candidates have welcomed federal involvement. In Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany called it "good news" that Trump's Justice Department was "coming to Wisconsin" for the election.

Election law experts have pushed back hard. Democracy Docket's Jacob Knutson wrote that the DOJ "lacks the legal authority to declare voting machines unlawful or unilaterally seize voting equipment," per Common Dreams, because the Constitution gives that power to state and local officials.

What the record shows

Georgia's Republican-controlled State Election Board voted 3-2, over its own Republican chairman's objection, to call in Trump's Justice Department — and two days later its executive director asked the DOJ to ban the QR-code ballots Georgia uses and force a software update before November 3. The system is already federally certified and cleared for this election, and an election-technology expert told the board the proposed changes carry "a very high risk" and "zero additional benefit."

Source

• Georgia Election Panel Asks the DOJ to Block the State's Voting System — The Washington Sun