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Common Cause Georgia, represented by the Brennan Center for Justice, today took legal action to ensure voters would not be denied the right to vote in the November election, even if voting machines fail.  

Federal District Court Justice Amy Totenberg today issued a ruling requiring the Georgia Secretary of State and local elections officials to ensure that polling places use paper backups of electronic poll books in the event of electronic pollbook failure. "Judge Totenberg’s order is a victory for voters and for the integrity of our elections. Common Cause Georgia has been working to improve our elections infrastructure for years...."

Today United States District Court Judge Amy Totenberg issued a preliminary injunction in Curling v. Raffensperger preventing the state of Georgia from continuing to use its insecure paperless voting machines in elections after 2019. The lawsuit challenged the state’s use of the Accuvote TS voting machine. The court found that the paperless voting systems which have been used for almost two decades in Georgia were too vulnerable to hacking and manipulation to ensure a fair election and their use should be discontinued. Additionally, the court made note of serious security flaws in Georgia’s voter registration database and electronic poll book systems and ordered that the state adopt important failsafes to protect voters. These include paper backups of electronic poll books at each precinct, the development of plans and procedures for dealing with errors in the voter registration database, and the adoption of clear directions on the use of provisional ballots.

Governor Brian Kemp today signed into law HB 392, which has a provision requiring Georgia’s secretary of state to take steps to shore up the security of the state’s voter registration database.  The move comes just weeks after Gov. Kemp signed HB 316, which included new protections for Georgia voters who are required to cast provisional ballots. These bills were passed in direct response to a lawsuit brought on behalf of Common Cause Georgia by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, along with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison LLP, and Sugarman LLP.

In a misleading statement released yesterday, Georgia Secretary of State (SOS) Brad Raffensperger claimed that the cost of deploying a voting system relying on hand-marked paper ballots and ballot marking devices for disability access would exceed the cost of deploying only electronic ballot marking devices for every voting station.  

“The citizens of Georgia need to know that voting machine vendors have wooed local officials with expensive perks. Multimillion dollar decisions about which system to buy should be made with the interests of Georgia voters and taxpayers in mind. They should not be made based on which company spent the most lobbying state legislators and fostering close connections with decisionmakers.”