Inside the fight to protect Georgia’s elections

Editor's note: Hear Georgia election official Janelle King on the effort to change the state's election rules here.

In Georgia, a Republican-led state election board is implementing new rules just weeks before election day. Local election officials say the new rules will hurt the state’s election security.

What's behind the upheaval in Georgia's elections?

Sam Gringlas, politics reporter at WABE, an NPR station in Atlanta.

Sara Tindall Ghazal, member of Georgia’s State Election Board. She’s the lone Democrat on the SEB. Election law attorney.

Christina Baal-Owens, executive director of Public Wise, a left-leaning nonprofit group that advocates for representative democracy.

J. Alex Halderman, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: It's less than one month until election day. And in Georgia, there's the state's election system is in turmoil. Georgia's Republican led state election board has been introducing new election rules just weeks before November. And those rules make significant changes to how elections are run in the state.

The latest effort came just yesterday, when the board voted to ask Georgia state lawmakers to update elections rules so that it would be harder. for county elections officials to reject challenges to voter eligibility. Mass voter challenges are being filed across the state. A few moments from public comment show just how intense the board meetings have become.

(MONTAGE)

We have discovered double counted ballots, deleted ballot images, machine malfunctions that skip counting ballots.

State Election Board, I'm asking you to declare a state of emergency today. To secure our elections.

This election was not stolen. We all know that. There is a minority that believes it was. And you are letting them hijack a system that works.

The point of this board is not to legislate. Or execute. It's to provide rules to make sure our elections are fair.

CHAKRABARTI: The state election board's GOP majority also voted yesterday to install its own election monitors in Fulton County, the biggest democratic leaning county in Georgia.

Now, the board has no legal authority to install its own monitors, but voted to do anyway, the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections is suing to stop that effort. The state elections board has introduced a bevy of other new elections rules, including requiring hand counting of ballots. Local election workers, both Democrats and Republicans who are on the ground and required to perform these duties, say the new rules are unreasonable and unnecessary.

I have a difference in opinion on this rule because you're violating the integrity of those ballots. You're in violating the chain of custody.

To expect each of the 159 county boards of elections to design and carry out training by November 5th is simply unrealistic. It is also unnecessary and costly to have each county further distinguish absentee from provisional ballots.

The world is going to hold us accountable for the decisions that we make. It matters. If this is how we're governing ourselves, let's be adults in the room and not push partisan ideology and partisan issues.

CHAKRABARTI: That was Milton Kidd, Director of Elections and Registration in Douglas County, Barbara Gooby, Poll Manager from Chatham County, and Ethan Compton, Election Supervisor in Irwin County, all speaking in public hearings at state board meetings where these new rules were voted on.

And we'll hear more a little bit through the rest of the hour from what other county officials are saying. But the state election board is drawing scrutiny from all levels of the state's election process, including from Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

BRAD RAFFENSPERGER: We want to make sure we don't have chaos.

We want to make sure that we don't have any questions about chain of custody. And some of the procedures that they're proposing would actually dilute and reduce the security, the robustness of the chain of custody. So we don't think that they're helpful.

CHAKRABARTI: The state election board now faces lawsuits on a number of fronts from both Democratic led and Republican led groups, as well as directly from nonpartisan local election officials.

Now, as we've mentioned, Georgia state election board is currently led by its Republican members and the new rules changes have passed along those partisan lines, three to two. In August, former President Donald Trump praised the GOP members by name.

DONALD TRUMP: I don't know if you've heard, but the Georgia State Election Board is in a very positive way.

This is a very positive thing, Marjorie. They're on fire. They're doing a great job. Three members, Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King, three people are all pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory. They're fighting.

CHAKRABARTI: So what exactly is happening in Georgia? And what might the impact be on voters?

As we've said, let's call it the last day of voting, aka Election Day, is less than a month away. We're going to start with Sam Gringlas. He's a politics reporter at WABE, NPR member station in Atlanta. Sam, it's great to have you.

SAM GRINGLAS: Hey, Meghna. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: All right, so I need some Georgia elections board 101 from you.

First what is the statutory mandate of this state election board?

GRINGLAS: So this board is first of all, an appointed board. It's not elected and their job is not to craft legislation, laws, policy. It's to interpret laws that have been passed by the state legislature and make rules to help local election officials.

Basically implement those laws. So there's limitations to what their task is here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So rules to help implementation. Okay. We're going to come back to that in a second, because I guess that is subject to interpretation, in terms of what exactly is helping. And who appoints the members of the board?

GRINGLAS: So each of these members, there's five, are appointed by different bodies or people. One is appointed by the state Republican party, one appointed by the state Democratic party, you've got one appointed by the governor right now, that's the non partisan chair, one appointed by the state House, and one appointed by the state Senate.

And so all of that, given the divide of power here in Georgia, has resulted in a board that has three Republican members, one Democratic member, and this one nonpartisan chair.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I presume that given that there are five members of the board, that there's always been, it's never been perfectly balanced, because it couldn't have been, between Republicans and Democrats.

So what's different this time around in terms of the makeup of the board?

GRINGLAS: So Republicans have controlled this board for a while. Republicans have held the levers of power in the state for several years now, but what's different in just the last year or two is many of these more mainstream Republican members who were maybe lawyers or involved in election law in some way, have changed over and have been replaced by more activist Republicans who have become involved in the election space really since 2020, and driven by these false claims about widespread fraud.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so tell me more about that. Because we did issue invitations to all five members of the board. Only one person got back to us and said they would join us. We'll hear from her in a little bit. But tell me, when you say that the Republican members are more activist right now, specifically, what's the evidence of that?

GRINGLAS: So there's this overlapping world of activists. And groups who have been involved in so called election integrity, especially since the 2020 election. So if we're looking at the members of the state election board, the one who most notably fits into this space is Dr. Jan Johnston. She's a retired OBGYN who basically after 2020 started coming to local election board meetings and leaning into false claims about fraud and irregularities during that election.

Since that time, she's been elevated to the state board and has been really the most vocal voice pushing some of these most controversial rules, and elevating claims of ongoing problems with the election process. Now, a lot of these rules have not been written by the board members themselves, but other activists who bring them in front of the board for a vote.

And many of those authors members have been connected to either local election officials who have vocally expressed doubts about election integrity or some of the groups who have been most active in this space of making false claims about election integrity since 2020.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So some of those claims that Dr. Johnston has been making, as you mentioned, Sam, include allegations, unsubstantiated allegations, we used to say, that tally sheets were falsified during an audit of voting. Here's a little bit more of her point of view on elections. This is Dr. Johnston from May of this year.

JOHNSTON: There's no way that this election or recount should have been certified. Mr. Chairman, I make a motion to amend the RLA totals to reflect the correct totals. Amend all records at the county and state level of election totals for this election in question to designate that the accurate and correct vote totals may not be accurate. Also, I have further make a motion to request the Secretary of State either invalidate 17,852 votes from the official certification or initiate an independent investigation to determine if 17,852 ballots are authentic.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that's Georgia State Elections Commission member Dr. Janice Johnston, again from May of this year, and she's talking about the 2020 election there. And just as, a little bit more detail, the other two Republican members of the board, there's Rick Jeffries. He was appointed by the Georgia Senate.

He's posted on Facebook memes that suggest that dead people voted by mail in the Georgia election in 2020. And Republican Janelle King, who was appointed by the Georgia House. Has tweeted things in regard to the 2020 election, such as, quote, I've spoken with a number of people about this vote counting process, and I have questions.

Now, Sam, just again, to get our facts straight, there have been a number of legal challenges to Georgia's outcomes in 2020, and none of them panned out, correct?

GRINGLAS: There have been recounts, there have been audits, there have been investigations. So many eyes have looked at the results of this last election and found no evidence of widespread fraud.

And by all accounts, this election was run freely and fairly, but as you alluded to there, we're now four years in, headed into the next presidential election, and among certain segments of the state, there has been this ongoing discussion over whether that election was free and fair. Of course, without evidence.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so we're going to talk a lot more through the whole hour about the changes that the board is recommending or has voted on, but we've got about a minute before our first break. Talk about the most recent vote that they just took yesterday, in terms of going back to the Georgia State Legislature to ask them to allow, or to make it harder for county officials to prevent mass challenges to voter rules.

What's that all about?

GRINGLAS: Yeah. So since 2020. Just a handful of individuals have filed basically tens of thousands of challenges to the eligibility of voters in Georgia, and there's been various legislation that's tinkering with the rules around this process. And what we heard from some of the most prolific challengers, is that they feel like the counties are wholesale tossing out their challenges without fully considering them.

Election officials say that they are doing their due diligence, but the Republican members of the state election board took on an investigation to look into whether these election boards were following the law, and they concluded yesterday that they felt like they were not. And that they want to see legislation from the state legislature to compel these local election boards to more fully consider these challenges.

There was, of course, a lot of disputing of that notion from a Democratic member of the state board and local election officials. But these changes won't affect this election cycle at this point.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: I said a little bit earlier that we'd be hearing from county level official officials and their reaction to these last-minute rules changes. Here's one of them. This is Tonnie Adams, Heard County election supervisor. And by the way, in 2020, Heard County went decidedly to Donald Trump, 84% to Trump to 15% to Biden.

Nevertheless, Tonnie Adams recently provided a football analogy to explain his opposition to the state elections board's rules changes.

TONNIE ADAMS: Imagine if you will, the national championship football game, everyone has been anticipating this matchup between the teams for four years. However, there is a small group of fans who do not like the way the game is being played.

So they have decided to approach the five commissioners, the football league, to change the rules less than two months before the game. Three of these commissioners think it's a good idea to change the rules. So despite the pleas of their fellow commissioners, the referees on the field, the concerned fans, they decide to go forward with these changes.

The game is played, as the action unfolds, the referees do their best to implement the new rules. However, the confusion with the new rules causes there to be irregularities. During the post-game news conference, the media asked the commissioners why there was so much confusion on the field. In response, the commissioners who proposed the new rules say that the new rules were common sense rules.

So the problem must have been with the officials tasked with their implementation. Is this what will happen when confusion leads to inconsistencies with the November 5th, 2024 election? Who will be given the blame when new rules cause chaos?

CHAKRABARTI: That's Tonnie Adams, Heard County Election Supervisor, and again in 2020, Heard County went 84% to Donald Trump.

So Sam, I love that analogy that Mr. Adams provided there, but explain to us some of the details behind it. What are some of the other most contentious rules changes that the board is seeking to implement?

GRINGLAS: So we're really talking about two buckets of rules here that are causing local election officials the most concern.

One relates to how elections are certified by local election boards after Election Day. And the other bucket has to do with hand counting the number of ballots on election night or in the days after to make sure that they're getting the same number. That the scanner is spitting out basically.

And both of these rules are causing local election officials, voting rights activists, a lot of concern. One, given that we are so close to voting getting underway. And two, the potential for local election board members to find supposed discrepancies, that kind of opens the doors for misinformation about the integrity of the election in these really critical days and weeks after Election Day.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay so tell me a little bit more. Because of course, the process of counting and certifying votes can be somewhat complicated, or at least differs from state to state, let alone from county to county. So what would be the specific changes to the certification rule?

GRINGLAS: Okay, so there's two rules related to certification.

One of them allows for a reasonable inquiry to happen by local election boards before certifying the election results. And another allows local election boards to examine all election related documents before certifying. On its face, this sounds pretty harmless, the supporters of these rules say that you're basically doing extra cross checks, verifying before you sign off on these rules, but what is causing local officials concern here is whether, you know, what happens if a local election board member finds a supposed discrepancy or says that they're not able to access all of the documents that they say they're allowed to see. What happens then? And that's the space where there could be the possibility of confusion, disruptions or delays.

CHAKRABARTI: Understood. Okay. And so for the ballot hand count, that's not to actually just like hand count the votes.

It's the head count, the total number of ballots.

GRINGLAS: Yes, you're not looking at what's actually on the ballot. One vote for Harris, two votes for Trump. You're just counting the physical pieces of paper that are in the scanner machines to make sure that the number of ballots that are there, the number of pieces of paper, is the same as the number that the scanner counted.

And what will happen is that on either election night or in the days after, a poll manager and two sworn poll officers will count in batches of 50, all of those pieces of paper in every polling place. And they'll have to keep doing it until they all get the same number, and that number matches the number that the scanner counted.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now, as you said, Sam, on the surface, these don't seem like unreasonable rules changes. So what are the concerns that the local elections officials have with this? The biggest concern is the last-minute nature of these changes. The certification rules were passed at the end of August, beginning of September.

The hand count rule was passed just in the last two weeks. And at this point, local election offices are already training poll workers. They're getting their systems and workspaces in place for early voting for Election Day, which is just around the corner at this point. And there's real fear that this could cause confusion, when you're trying to teach poll workers something in the middle of the process.

It's like tinkering with the mechanics when the plane is already taking off.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, okay. Now so here's the point of view from another local elections official. This is Butts County Elections Director Brook Schreiner. And in 2020, Butts County went again decidedly to Donald Trump. 71% to Trump to Biden's 28%.

Back in September, Schreiner said that she's not necessarily opposed to the rules changes, but Sam, to your point, she's very concerned about the timing.

SCHREINER: Regarding the rule on election night ballot counting, requiring the poll manager and two clerks to individually count ballots from the scanner would unnecessarily delay election day tabulation.

Poll managers and workers are already tasked with sealing all ballots, securing the memory cards, ensuing all recap sheets are accounted for, which is then transported to the tabulation center. Adding this additional step would slow down the two required uploads for an election night reporting.

Furthermore, many poll workers and managers take time off from their regular jobs for election day duties and return to work the following day. The requirements for them to return the next day at the poll manager's discretion is impractical for many polling locations.

CHAKRABARTI: Again, that's Butts County Elections Director Brook Schreiner in September.

And as a reminder, in 2020, Butts County went decidedly to Donald Trump by a 71% to 28% margin. Okay, so to recap here, there are five members of the State Board of Elections in Georgia, and they are Chairman John Fervier, who was appointed by Governor Brian Kemp in January of this year. He's a Republican, but serving in a nonpartisan position as chairman.

Then there's member Sara Tindall Ghazal, a Democrat, appointed by the Democratic Party June 2021. Dr. Janice Johnston, who we've talked about before, a Republican, appointed by the Republican Party in Georgia March of 2022. Rick Jeffries, a Republican appointed by the Georgia State Senate, January of 2024, and Janelle King, a Republican appointed by the Georgia House of Representatives, May 2024.

And as a reminder, we did reach out to each and every member of the state elections board and asked them multiple times if they would join us for an interview. Four of them denied our requests or decided not to join us. One of them did, and that is Sara Tindall Ghazal. She is the lone Democrat, as you heard, on the Georgia State Elections Board.

And she joins us now from Atlanta. Sara Ghazal, welcome to On Point.

SARA TINDALL GHAZAL: Hi, Meghna. Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So first of all, you've been serving on the board for quite some time, since 2021. I guess post the 2020 election, but nevertheless, it's been several years now. In terms of the functioning of the board, what has changed in the past few years?

GHAZAL: So when I was appointed to the board, there was a major change made by the state legislature. Up until the legislative session in 2021, the chairman had always been the secretary of state. As our chief elections officer. So the board was an adjunct. When I joined, that was right at the same moment that the secretary of state moved off.

But every other member of the board, like me, was an attorney. So we all understood the law, understood what our role was, our statutory role was. And we worked obscurity, which is what you want in a board like this, because it's a very wonky, granular sort of thing. We don't run the elections.

All we do are write rules that explain the laws and we oversee a hearing process when there are violations. As each new member has come on and we were getting more and more, I think Sam correctly said, that we're getting more activist types. And now I'm literally the only attorney on a board whose primary role is to interpret the law.

CHAKRABARTI: I just need to correct myself really quickly. Because earlier when I said that the other four members of the board refused our request to join us, that was actually incorrect. They simply did not respond to our requests. I wanna be sure to get that right.

But Ms. Ghazal, to your point about you being the only attorney and specifically you're an attorney in Elections Law. Is that, but that's not mandated in terms of the statute that creates the board. There's no specificity that says those people on it have to be attorneys, is there?

GHAZAL: No, there's not.

In fact, there's no minimum qualifications at all.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So then tell me a little bit more though about, I don't know if you can, about what's going on behind the scenes and discussions between members of the board as these rule changes are being debated or talked about or considered. What kind of things do you hear from your fellow board members?

GHAZAL: Quite frankly, nothing anymore. We, it used to be a very collaborative effort, and people would leave partisanship at the door when we would work together to try to make sure that counties had the support they needed to run our elections.

But at this point, the other three members don't communicate with me aside from very rarely on email. And it's clear that they don't really care what I have to say. Because they certainly don't, they don't follow my advice when I suggest that we are perhaps not within the boundaries of what statute allows.

CHAKRABARTI: So then, okay, let's take one example. Let's take this most recent vote that was just yesterday for the board, again, the GOP majority voted to place its own elections monitors in various counties in Georgia, even though Georgia law prevents the board from doing exactly that. Can you characterize what the public discussion at least was around that, before that vote was taken?

GHAZAL: I don't think there was a formal vote on that. But what's happening now is actually we are getting sued by Fulton County for a declaratory judgment on how far we can go, how far they can go, understand that Fulton County has actually hired, at a cost of $100,000, a professional team that has a deep background in elections to monitor their elections already, to monitor everything, the entire process, they're also bringing in the Carter Center.

Which has monitored 150 elections around the world. It's one of the premier organizations, but what the members of the board wanted were their own people, but the people that they want in there have a long history of denying the results of the 2020 elections. And initially what got us to this point was an agreement with Fulton County and the Secretary of State's office back in May that we would come up with a mutually agreed upon team. But now that's devolved to, you take who we want, or we're going to somehow punish you for refusing the people that we insist. And the people that they're insisting on are, in my view, wholly inappropriate.

CHAKRABARTI: Sam, let me check that with you. Does that comport or not with your reporting on this issue?

GRINGLAS: Yeah Fulton County has been a center of a lot of these false claims about election integrity in 2020, and this is another example, I think, of those conspiracy theories continuing to unspool even four years after that election.

And it's interesting, I went to poll worker recruitment in Fulton County back in January, and was very curious to see if these continued false claims, the harassment and threats that poll workers in Fulton County faced back in 2020 was dissuading anyone from volunteering to work this election.

And despite all of that, I met a lot of folks who felt like it spurred them to want to do this work even more. Sara's right that this fight is ongoing, but it's also not stopping election professionals and volunteers from wanting to do the hard work of running elections in this really important stretch in this really important state.

CHAKRABARTI: I once again want to say that it's unfortunate that the other members of the board did not respond to our interview request, because nothing replaces someone actually telling people the reasoning behind their decision making. But actually, on that, Sam, let me check with you quickly. You are the political reporter WABE, not an insignificant journalist in Georgia. Do the members, other members of the board speak to you?

GRINGLAS: Sometimes Janelle King came on our air a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Johnston gaggled with reporters during a break at the meeting yesterday. Now if you're reaching out to them for a comment on a specific story, that might be something different, but they haven't gaged in some respects to try and explain their decision making.

What we hear from them is related to certification, that they feel like local board members, if they're signing off on something, should have the ability to look into it that they're not influenced by partisanship or praise from former President Trump. A lot of people would disagree with that.

But that is what we're hearing them say as they defend their record on this decision making.

CHAKRABARTI: Sara ... let me turn back to you here. Because, for example, we've been watching videos of the board meetings over the past recent time. And they are quite intense. The public comment is very impassioned, and also from the previous hearings where local elections officials have come, both Democrats and Republicans, and saying, this is going to be really hard for us to pull off in November.

What's the response from the other members of the board upon hearing this?

GHAZAL: They seem to not take those claims very seriously. And that is one place where there has been some exchanges on email. And frankly, some of the members have been quite dismissive of concerns of election supervisors.

But at the same time, I've seen reports, I've received reports directly from some of these directors, that they're losing poll staff, they're losing poll managers. It's the last straw that breaks that camel's back. Because it's an incredibly heavy responsibility to run a poll, and again, back in 2021 with the changes that the legislature made, they imposed really strict deadlines for getting vote totals uploaded.

Some counties will still be able to do that because they have the staff and the budget to have runners go to each precinct and pick up everything. But some of them do not. So they can't get anything in until everything is done.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Christina Baal-Owens is the Executive Director of Public Wise. It's a left leaning non profit group that advocates for democracy, representative democracy. And they have an election threat issue index, which identifies election deniers that are serving in public offices in seven swing states, in particular, including Georgia, and Baal-Owens says all three Republican members of Georgia State Elections Board are on that list.

CHRISTINA BAAL-OWENS: Rick Jeffares had Facebook posts and memes on his social media that suggested that dead people were voting by mail, and that was because the Democrats had cheated.

Janelle King has previously tweeted in regards to the 2020 election. Quote, I've spoken with a number of people about this vote counting process and I have questions. And she talks about the results being questionable. And Janice Johnston, she called for the firing of Fulton County's election director, criticized the job performance of temporary election workers who we really should be looking at as heroes, quite honestly. And repeated unsubstantiated allegations of falsified tally sheets during an audit.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Christina Baal-Owens, Executive Director of Public Wise. Okay, let's hear from another county elections officials. This is Tate Fall, Director of Elections for Cobb County. Now, Cobb County did go to Biden in 2020, 56% for Biden and 42% for Donald Trump. Back in September of this year, September 20th, Tate Fall pleaded with the state elections board to stop the last minute rules changes.

TATE FALL: Yesterday, Cobb County emailed just over 1,000 ballots to our uniformed and overseas voters. Today, we mailed 70 ballots to uniformed and overseas voters. The first ballots are out the door. The election has officially begun. Additionally, we're only 17 days away from mailing regular absentee by mail ballots.

We are just 25 days away from advanced in person voting starting. And 46 days from election day in Cobb. We've already trained all of our ... workers and to bring them back in and retrain them on new procedures at this time is not only time prohibitive, but very cost prohibitive and is not a good use of our taxpayer dollars.

So again, we join together to implore you to mirror a 90-day quiet period on all rules.

CHAKRABARTI: Tate Fall, Director of Elections for Cobb County, saying that basically the elections are underway in Georgia. Now, Sam, a quick follow up to that. You heard Fall there talk about the 90 day quiet period on all rules, but that's not the quiet period in Georgia.

I understand Georgia has a 45 day quiet period. Am I wrong about that?

GRINGLAS: So she's referring there to the National Voter Registration Act, which talks about what a quiet period is, not making major changes to elections or election rules in these days before the election. Now, Georgia, you mentioned 45 days, that's written into state statute, but either way, we're well within both of those periods at this point.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so there's another issue in Georgia that's getting a lot of scrutiny and a lot of attention, and that has to do with voting machines in Georgia. Sam, can you give us a little bit of background on that?

GRINGLAS: So this is a long running debate over the integrity of Georgia's voting machines. These are Dominion machines and this really goes back to 2020 when there was a whole variety of conspiracy theories and false claims about the safety and integrity of these machines. There have also been several long running lawsuits over these machines. And this has continued to be something that we hear during public comment at these state election board meetings, at local election board meetings, where you just see scores of people with paper ballot shirts coming in to express their concerns about these machines.

At yesterday's meeting a man testified and put a bag over head as a prop to represent supposedly how Georgia voters have been in the dark about the safety of these machines.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Wow. And just as a sort of further background, people might remember that Dominion, I can't say they won a lawsuit, but they had sued Fox News in particular for spreading what they called lies about the integrity of Dominion's voting machines.

And Fox settled with Dominion to the tune of $787 million. Okay. However, there do seem to be some questions that have been raised by researchers about these election machines, specifically regarding the security of Georgia's elections, because of those Dominion voting machines.

J. ALEX HALDERMAN: So the process in Georgia, if you go to vote in a polling place is you use a touchscreen computer to select your choices.

Then it prints a paper ballot that shows your choices, hopefully in text, and also encodes them as a kind of barcode, a QR code. Then you take that piece of paper, and you put it into a ballot scanner. The scanner reads the barcode, and that's used to tabulate the results.

CHAKRABARTI: So this is Alex Halderman, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan.

Just to be clear, what he said, you get a paper, the Georgian machine prints out a paper ballot that shows the choices that you made for who you wanted to vote for. And then encodes them in a barcode or a QR code, which is then read by a second machine. Now, in 2020, as part of a lawsuit called Curling v. Raffensperger, Professor Halderman was commissioned to review the security of Georgia's voting machines.

HALDERMAN: What I found was a number of very serious vulnerabilities in the Dominion BMDs. It would be possible, for instance, for a voter in the voting booth in just a few seconds to reboot the machines, gain full access to their software and data.

And potentially alter the software word data right there in the voting booth. What I demonstrated in court was that a voter can just take a ballpoint pen and reach into the back of the machine, poke the pen through a hole, and access a switch. That lets you reboot it and gain full control.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Halderman says that if a foreign adversary successfully hacks these voting machines, they could easily manipulate the results, whether on the printed ballots or on the QR code, which would then make the change even more difficult to spot.

HALDERMAN: The kicker for me is that these are problems that I discovered, and we reported to the state initially in 2021. If you had told me that in November 2024, they still would not have patched the software to close these security holes, I just wouldn't have believed it. Dominion produced a patch two years ago that purports to address many of the problems that I pointed out, but it's up to the Secretary of State's office to install it.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so once again, to be clear, the professor says Dominion produced a patch to cover these security holes back in 2021, and according to him, as of right now, those patches have not been installed because the Secretary of State's office has yet to do that across Georgia. So Professor Halderman says he and most security experts prefer a hand-marked ballot, good old Scantron, that then goes into the machines, which is what happens in most states.

But despite all of these concerns, Professor Halderman still made it clear that he believes the most important step for everybody listening is to still cast your vote.

HALDERMAN: It's important to point out that the existence of vulnerabilities is not in and of itself evidence that any past election result was compromised.

But it's certainly a concern looking ahead, and something that Georgia ought to be doing more proactively to defend against. Of course, as a voter, the existence of vulnerabilities isn't a reason not to vote, a reason to, if you do go and vote to make sure you're very carefully checking your ballot to make sure everything printed on it matches what you wanted to vote for.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Alex Halderman, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. So Sara Tindall Ghazal, you heard Professor Halderman there, and to his point, he testified to as much in court back in 2020, that a simple ballpoint pen in a particular hole in the back of the machine could reboot some of the voting machines used in Georgia, let alone questions around the integrity of the QR codes presented.

These may not be the specific concerns that some people are bringing before the board in public comment, but nevertheless, it seems like there are valid reasons for there to be concerns about the machines being used in Georgia. Is there anything that the state elections board can do about that?

GHAZAL: The choice of going with a BMD system was the legislature. And it was not a choice that I would have made. I also prefer hand marked paper ballots, but we have to implement what the legislature has chosen, and it's the Secretary of State's office that determines what sort of software updates that they are able to implement.

We have 159 counties here in Georgia, an absurdly high number, so anything is really complicated, but I want to highlight what Professor Halderman said, which is, we have paper ballots that point out the voters choice. Voters have to review that and make sure it reflects their choice. But I would be hard pressed to believe that somebody wouldn't notice if their printed ballot was wrong, especially at the top of the ticket.

And we audit those ballots. The top of the ticket will always be audited. And what that means is we will hand count a statistically significant number of those ballots and compare that with the tabulation on the machines to make sure that they are accurately reflecting the voters' choices.

So because we have this system, I have no concerns that the outcome in November will be anything but exactly what the voters have chosen.

CHAKRABARTI: So you can say right now they have total faith in the integrity of Georgia's election system.

GHAZAL: I do. And the system writ large, meaning the system includes the physical safeguards, it includes our staff, it includes our election professionals, and it includes those paper ballots.

Just quickly, in the interest of the Georgians listening, so you're advising that everybody take a look at the names of the people they voted for that get printed out on that piece of paper, that the machine spits out along with the QR code. If in the off chance that the names don't match, what should a voter do?

GHAZAL: Voters should go to a poll worker, have that piece of paper voided out. Make sure it's counted so everything's accounted for, and they can cast a new ballot and make sure that it is accurate.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, and voiding out that piece of paper would be good enough because it hadn't yet been counted by the second machine?

GHAZAL: Exactly. As long as the BMDs, the ballot marking devices and printers, are nothing more than a giant electronic ballpoint pen. Basically, it's just printing it out so that there are fewer errors. Nobody can overvote. In other words, you can't vote for more people than was allowed in that race.

So there are fewer spoiled ballots. But spoiling the paper before it goes in the scanner, it's fine. It hasn't been counted.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So last question for you Ms. Ghazal, we've been talking about the last minute changes that the board, but specifically the Republican members of the board have been voting on and trying to push through.

Similarly, couldn't the board vote to request the Secretary of State's office to install these patches in the machines that have existed since 2021. Has that motion or that idea ever been even considered by the board? Have you raised that idea with the board?

GHAZAL: This is something that we did discuss at length a year and a half ago, but we were already at a point of working with the Secretary of State's office.

They did not have the logistics or, frankly, the funding to be able to do that. Because, like I said, 159 counties, the logistics of getting each machine would have to be reprogrammed basically from scratch, and there are tens of thousands of ballot marking devices, and it was just logistically impossible at that point.

It is definitely something that we looked at. We tried to figure out if there were steps that we could take. Trying to support the Secretary of State's office, but we had to defer to their judgment that it was just not physically possible at that point.

CHAKRABARTI: Sara Tindall Ghazal, Elections Law Attorney and member of the Georgia State Election Board, the lone Democrat on the board, thank you so much for joining us today.

GHAZAL: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Sam, we've got about a minute and a half left here. Overall, we heard clearly from Ms. Ghazal that she has faith in the integrity of Georgia's elections. Is that same faith mirrored by the people of Georgia? What impact has all this rules upheaval had on actual voters?

GRINGLAS: A lot of these rules that we're talking about are on the back end of elections, not the front-end voter process when you're going to the polls. Now, that's not to say there haven't been a lot of changes since 2020. The legislature has passed a sweeping overhaul of Georgia election law and continued to tinker with election law in the years since.

So there are certainly things that will look different today than maybe four years ago, but these rules really have to do with these critical days and weeks after the 2024 presidential election, which, as we saw in 2020, can be very intense and heated if there are wide claims of widespread election fraud and efforts to undermine the results as we saw in 2020. At the end of the day, though, voters should feel confident that it's their neighbors, their firefighters, their teachers that are running these local elections.

And that they're doing their level best to make sure that these results are free and fair. Now, whether that's enough to convince everyone in the state of Georgia that is the case, I'm sure it's not. But we all, reporters, poll watchers, voting rights advocates, election officials will all be having really close eyes on the way this process plays out over the next several weeks.