Imagine using the touchscreen voting machine, making your choices, and scanning your anonymous ballot into the ballot box—only to learn later that the state’s scanner placed a traceable tracking number on the electronic ballot record. Yes, that is what happens in all Georgia polling places.
Election staff might promise not to look at how you voted. Or promise not to share it with demanding authority figures, –say the sheriff, or mayor, or school system superintendent. They might restrict access to the county server where the data is stored, or black out part of the identifiers when releasing public records. Although they have not redacted the public records in the past. Or might release it by accident, as multiple counties released highly restricted databases after the 2020 election (with no accountability.)
That is not an anonymous secret ballot as Georgia law demands. It is a traceable ballot, weakly guarded by a promise and hope of no data spills.
Georgia’s Constitution requires elections by secret ballot, and state statute demands “absolute secrecy so that no person can see or know” how another voter voted. Absolute secrecy means anonymity: a ballot that cannot be connected to the voter. It does not mean that officials, vendors, contractors, or hackers may possess the connection so long as they promise to keep it “sort of confidential.”
Yet Georgia’s Dominion scanners create electronic ballot records with supposedly randomized Record IDs. Researchers discovered years ago that the numbers are not random—they are predictable and fixed. The formula can be reversed by a middle school math student, restoring ballots to the order in which they were scanned.
The researchers aptly named the privacy busting flaw in the Dominion Voting System– “DVSorder”— pronounced “devious order.”
Once ballot order is reconstructed with a simple math formula, it can be compared with voter order obtained from security video, observer notes, scanner counters, check-in timestamps (in many cases), or other records. When both sequences are known, matching voters with their ballots is not guesswork. It is like placing two like-numbered lists side by side.
Artificial intelligence has now poured gasoline on this smoldering problem and brought the match.
Princeton AI researcher Max Springer recently, in the matter of a few hours, used ordinary AI coding tools and public election records to recover the scanning order of approximately 1.52 million ballots from Georgia’s May 2026 primary—98.9 percent of the in-person ballots examined across 139 counties. He did not enter an election office, touch voting equipment, obtain confidential information, see voting system software, or write sophisticated code from scratch.
The barrier that once required specialized programming expertise has largely disappeared. What previously might have taken a skilled researcher considerable time can now be attempted rapidly and at enormous scale using consumer-level AI. See our CGG report on this vulnerability and ease of exploitation.
The Secretary of State’s response has been recklessly inadequate.
Gabriel Sterling, back through the revolving door at the SOS office again, told the AJC that connecting voters with ballots still involves “considerable guessing” and said new instructions to counties should make such matching “impossible.” Neither assurance withstands scrutiny.
When voter order is known, there is no guessing—there is direct traceability. And redacting Record IDs from records released to the public does not stop scanners from creating and archiving the traceable records. The complete traceable information remains in election files, backups, and copies held by officials, vendors, or contractors. Nor does the Secretary’s solution work to mask the data for past elections in the case of future requests.
That is the difference between confidentiality and anonymity. Confidentiality says, “We know how you voted, but trust us not to tell.” Anonymity means no one possesses a record capable of knowing or revealing it.
The Founders understood that government promises are no substitute for structural protection. Conservatives should understand that instinctively. We do not protect the First Amendment by having the government decide who may speak freely. We do not protect the Fourth Amendment by allowing warrantless searches while promising not to disclose what was found. And we cannot protect the secret ballot by creating traceable voting records and merely saying we will limit who may see them (and while giving them to commercial vendors).
Further, concealing ballot-level records from the public damages election transparency. Candidates, journalists, parties, voting rights groups, and citizens need anonymous ballot level records to audit election results. Georgia officials should not choose between providing ballot secrecy and permitting public oversight. Georgia voters are entitled to both, according to the Georgia Constitution—if not Secretary Raffensperger.
Corrected Dominion software has been federally certified since 2023, yet Georgia still uses the flawed version. The State Election Board, Secretary of State, county boards, and lawmakers must act before October early voting begins. They should deploy and independently test corrected software, preserve properly anonymized public records, and establish lawful backup procedures—including hand-marked paper ballots and secure bipartisan ballot randomization—where necessary. Secretary Raffensperger whines that the legislature did not fund the software patch but fails to mention that this year he did not even ask them for the money to do so.
Georgia must stop creating traceable ballots, not simply limit access to insiders and favored vendors.
A secret ballot is not a courtesy from government. It is a constitutional command—and “sort of confidential” is not nearly good enough. Call your local county election board and demand that the unlawful and invasive practices be stopped. Ask the State Election Board to adopt emergency rules or issue orders to direct compliance with the secret ballot laws that are meant to protect us all and our elections. Ask that the election rulemaking oversight committees of the General Assembly (House Governmental Affairs and Senate Ethics) immediately engage with the State Election Board to offer guidance and support.
Marilyn Marks is the executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance
