Federal judge denies motion to force Georgia to adopt paper ballots in midterm election

By Ellen Nakashima
September 18 at 9:50 AM

A federal judge in Atlanta denied a motion Monday night to force the state of Georgia to switch from electronic touch screen machines to paper ballots for the Nov. 6 midterm elections.

But U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg also indicated that in the future she would be prepared to rule — and rule quickly — that Americans have a right to cast a vote in a way that can’t be hacked.

She warned state and county officials that “further delay is not tolerable” in “confronting and tackling the challenges before the state’s election balloting system.”

The motion was filed in August by election integrity advocates seeking to compel Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp to abandon the state’s centrally run system of paperless electronic voting. They argued that a failure to do so would deprive Georgia’s 6.8 million voters of their constitutional right to vote and that the machines themselves were vulnerable to hacking — especially by foreign governments like Russia.

-snip-