Judge is warned Georgia election ruling could trigger 'unrest and potentially violence'

Election officials are begging a federal judge not to order Georgia to get rid of its electronic voting machines, warning the changes could set off a violent reaction.

U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg drew praise five years ago for forcing the state to ditch voting machines because they were too vulnerable to hacks, but current and former officials from both parties at the local, state and federal level have cautioned that it's too close to November's election to make a similar order against Georgia's new machines, reported Politico.

"[It's] a recipe for unrest and potentially violence,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the only Democrat on Georgia’s State Election Board, which is a defendant in the case Totenberg is weighing.

Arguments in a civil trial that started Jan. 9 in Atlanta are expected to conclude Wednesday, and then the judge will issue a ruling in the coming weeks, giving the Barack Obama appointee an unusually influential position over how the vote is conducted in the key swing state won by President Joe Biden in 2020 – which prompted a scheme for which Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants were ultimately indicted.

The mistrust Trump sowed in the last election's results continues to undermine faith in U.S. democracy, and Totenberg is hearing arguments on the security of voting machines Georgia bought from Dominion Voting Systems.

“There are thousands of Georgians who take Mike Lindell seriously,” Tindall Ghazal said.

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Dominion has sued MyPillow CEO Lindell and other Trump allies who spread conspiracy theories about its equipment, and the company reached a $787 million settlement in its case against Fox News, but the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance and the other plaintiffs in the trial are trying to persuade Totenberg that the machines were liable to sabotage.

Some of the nation's leading voting machine security experts agree, saying the judge must take action because state officials aren't taking those risks seriously enough – pointing to evidence that pro-Trump activists improperly accessed Dominion equipment in rural Georgia in January 2021 and may have obtained a roadmap for hackers.

“As long as you have 100,000 pieces of equipment floating around in the hands of bad actors, you have no way of controlling the system,” said Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech computer science professor who testified for the plaintiffs.

Totenberg has suggested she prefers ordering "reasonable fixes" to the equipment rather than banning the machines as she did in 2019, but experts say the timing of her decision could be an issue.

“There is probably no good time to do this,” said Gregory Miller, the co-founder and chief operating officer at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, which is not involved in the case. “[Thankfully] somebody is at last bringing to light the need to take more seriously the casting, counting and auditing of ballots.”