If you thought Georgia’s vote counting policies couldn’t get any more controversial, think again.
On June 2, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office directed counties conducting the July 28 Congressional District 13 special election to use a radically new (and unlawful) vote-counting process. Under the Secretary’s directive, official federal office election results would be generated, not from official paper ballots counted within Georgia’s certified voting system, but from electronic ballot images transmitted over the internet to a commercial vendor and interpreted and tallied by proprietary software.
Think I’m joking? Read Raffensperger’s directive we’ve annotated with our rebuttal.
Astoundingly, when the AJC asked Raffensperger if this vote counting method is legal, he responded, “You’d have to ask a lawyer,” he said. “I’m an engineer.” Perhaps his staff should have asked a lawyer before directing the counties to undertake this unlawful rogue vote tallying process.
In last week’s State Election Board meeting, Jeanne Dufort of Morgan County described the scheme and its problems in terms any voter can relate to.
For two decades, election officials across democratic nations have strongly warned against internet voting because transmitting votes over the internet creates severe security, accuracy, and transparency concerns. Yet the Secretary’s new directive would require voters and candidates to trust a process in which electronic ballot images (pictures) are exported from the certified system, transmitted via internet to a commercial vendor, and used with private software, behind closed doors, to generate the official certified vote count, outside the presence of sworn election officials. All in a process that Raffensperger says he, not county officials, will conduct the official count.
The General Assembly determines what constitutes an official ballot, and what categories of voting systems are authorized. The State Election Board is charged with adopting rules governing election administration and defining procedures necessary to conduct elections for each approved voting system. This includes defining what counts as a vote. The Administrative Procedure Act provides legislative oversight of SEB rulemaking. The Secretary of State does not have a role in those determinations.
None of those safeguards were followed here.
Enacted statutes are clear that the paper ballot is the official document for vote counting. The General Assembly did not authorize internet transmission of ballot images for official vote counting. There was no State Election Board rule defining this electronic derivative artifact passed through the internet as the vote to be counted. And certainly no cybersecurity experts were consulted about the security concerns.
Instead, counties received a rogue directive from Secretary Raffensperger. All lawmakers should call for a halt to this nonsensical plan for a federal office election.
Raffensperger points to Senate Bill 189, passed in 2024. But SB 189 did not authorize this in any way. SB189 called for an entirely new touchscreen voting system, without QR codes, but thankfully, has not funded it. SB189 directed the Secretary to conduct an OCR-based “audit” pilot program to “verify” text printing on ballot images (whatever that means). An “audit” (?) of pictures of printing on ballots is not official vote tabulation. Nothing in SB 189 authorized official election results to be tabulated by proprietary software operating outside Georgia’s certified voting system, particularly using electronic pictures transmitted via internet.
The Secretary’s proposed cure is worse than the disease.
Under Raffensperger’s new scheme, a voter casts a ballot on the current (untrustworthy) touchscreen machine. That machine prints a ballot the voter cast in the precinct scanner. The voting system scanner creates an image of the ballot. The image is transmitted via internet to a vendor. Proprietary software interprets the words on the image. The software generates vote totals. Those totals become the official result.
Every step moves farther away from the voter’s direct expression of intent.
Every step introduces another layer of untrustworthy software, another point of failure, and another opportunity for error or subversion.
Most importantly, no certified voting system operates this way. The proposed OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software proposed is not a voting system or component. It is not certified. It is not publicly observable. Political parties, candidates, and citizens cannot meaningfully inspect how it reaches its conclusions. Yet it would determine the official outcome of the election.
That should set off loud alarm bells for every legislator in Georgia. And they should be prepared to immediately shut down this plan at the beginning of the June 17 special session. Georgia’s congressional delegation should weigh in on a bipartisan basis to object to a House seat election being conducted in this manner.
Fortunately, the State Election Board moved quickly last week to begin addressing the issue through its lawful rulemaking authority. That is exactly how election policy questions should be resolved— through transparent public processes subject to legislative oversight— not through administrative improvisation.
County election officials should seek independent legal advice before implementing this unorthodox process that will certainly invite litigation and post-election challenges.
If Georgia is going to change how official votes are counted, that decision belongs to the people’s elected representatives and the public rulemaking process established by law.
Not to a vendor. Not to proprietary software. And not to a unilateral directive from a single statewide official.
The author is executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a non-partisan non-profit organization focused on election integrity.
