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Georgia's voting machines have a flaw that lets anyone with about $20 and a few hours reconstruct how a huge share of the state's voters cast their ballots, and state election officials just declined to require the fix before this November's elections.
The problem sits in the touchscreen machines Georgia uses statewide, built by Dominion Voting Systems. Voters mark their choices on a touchscreen, the machine prints a paper ballot, and a scanner adds the record to a digital file listing each ballot's selections, stripped of the voter's name. To protect the secret ballot, the scanner is supposed to shuffle those records into random order before they're made public.
Max Springer, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, found that the shuffle isn't random at all: the scanning software applies a deterministic algorithm, meaning the original casting order can be reconstructed from the public records if you know how the algorithm works. Using publicly available AI coding agents (LLM-based tools that write and debug code from plain-language instructions), he spent roughly $20 building a program that reversed the shuffle across 114 of Georgia's 139 counties. It recovered the casting order for 1.52 million in-person ballots, or 98.9% of the votes he examined. Cross-referencing that order against early voting lists, scanner audit logs, and precinct check-in records, all public under Georgia's open-records law, he was able to uniquely match roughly 1% of those voters to their individual ballot. Across his 1.52-million-ballot sample, that works out to around 15,000 Georgians whose specific vote could be traced back to them.
Springer recommends counties install Dominion scanner software version 5.17 or newer, which patches the flaw. But Georgia's State Election Board isn't requiring it. Board member Salleigh Grubbs proposed setting a deadline for counties to install the update, and the board voted her proposal down, according to the Associated Press. Gabriel Sterling, special projects manager for the Secretary of State's office, downplayed the risk, arguing that anyone trying to influence an election would find it more effective to buy votes through mail ballots or target voters through ordinary campaign outreach than to reverse-engineer scanner data.
Some voting-rights advocates want a different fix entirely. Marilyn Marks of the Coalition for Good Governance argues Georgia should address the exposure at its source rather than restrict access to the public records that make the attack possible, for example by collecting ballots in locked boxes and shuffling them again at central tabulation centers before any data is released.
Nothing in the reporting indicates this flaw has been used to target real voters. But with the Georgia state board unwilling to mandate the patch, whether ballot stay secret this November now comes down to whether your county takes the initiative to install the update.
