County election officials across Georgia say it's too late to switch to paper ballots in the upcoming elections, despite warnings that hackers could easily penetrate the state's antiquated electronic voting system and that Russia could unleash a new wave of disruptive cyberattacks.
U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg is expected to rule any day on whether the state must switch to paper ballots. Her ruling would come in response to a year-old lawsuit by citizen activists. They argue that the state's current system of relying on electronic voting machines that lack a paper backup is "hopelessly compromised" and paper ballots are necessary to ensure public confidence in the results.
Georgia is one of many states dealing with the fallout of U.S. intelligence agencies' conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 election and has compromised _ or tried to compromise _ state election systems across the country to disrupt the 2018 midterm elections.
But interviews and court statements from Republican and Democratic county officials and from state election officials drew the same response: It's too late to make the switch.
Lawyers for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp say things will get chaotic if Totenberg orders a statewide shift to paper ballots. Kemp is the Republican nominee for governor.
"It's impossible," said Rinda Wilson, the Republican chairman of the Macon-Bibb County Board of Elections. Anyone who says otherwise, she said, "doesn't have the faintest idea how the whole system works. You have deadlines, you have early voting. ... It would throw the entire election into chaos."
Such a shift at this stage would cause "significant administrative and financial burden" on Muscogee County, which borders Alabama in central Georgia, said Nancy Boren, its election director.
The county would want more time to train poll workers and educate the public and doesn't have enough scanners to handle all ballots, Boren said.
Last week, Democrats on the elections board in Morgan County, a Republican bastion in central Georgia, sought to capitalize on a vacant seat that briefly gave them the majority. But even as they proposed to dump the electronic voting machines and push the county toward paper ballots that would be read by optical scanners, Republicans filled the vacancy and defeated the motion.
In court statements filed in the lawsuit against Kemp and other state officials, election directors from several counties said switching to hand-marked paper ballots so late could be prohibitively costly or complex.
The activists' push for paper ballots has been propelled by security concerns stemming from a breach in Georgia's election system and worries that Russia' will repeat cyberattacks that interfered with the 2016 elections.
In 2017, Politico reported that a cybersecurity professional named Logan Lamb gained access to Georgia's election servers months before the 2016 election and downloaded personal data of about 6.7 million voters from a statewide voter registration database.
In July, special counsel Robert Mueller revealed, in an indictment accusing a dozen Russian military intelligence officers of illegally hacking top Democrats, that some of them visited county election websites in Georgia.
The ensuing fury, a threat to Kemp's election prospects, has fed heated rhetoric from both sides.
But at least one other state made a last-minute change.
After Virginia's electronic voting machines were decertified in September 2017, election officials in more than 20 counties and localities acquired and set up a new system in time for that year's election.
When it comes to making late changes in election procedures, where there's a will, there's a way, said David Bjerke, the elections director for Falls Church, Va., a suburb of Washington.
"Elections officials since 2000 have been learning to roll with the punches," Bjerke said. "That is just how the election industry works."
