By Kate Brumback, The Associated Press
Security researchers warn that rapid advances in artificial intelligence are increasing the urgency of fixing a flaw in Georgia’s voting equipment that can allow voters to be matched to their ballots after they have been cast.
The system’s vulnerability has drawn renewed attention, with election security advocates criticizing state election officials for not fixing it before the November elections. Georgia election officials say they have taken steps to limit potential harm, but some advocates say those measures fall short.
The flaw does not allow votes to be changed or cast doubt on election results, but it could let someone see how others voted. That matters because ballot secrecy is a fundamental right under the state constitution, and violations could create an opening for legal challenges.
Although the flaw has been known for a few years, experts say the widespread availability and speed of AI tools have heightened concerns about how easily it could now be exploited.
“This is a bit of a wake-up call because it illustrates how much more easily vulnerabilities can be exploited now that AI can do all of the technical work for you,” said J. Alex Halderman, a voting technology specialist at the University of Michigan who was part of the team that exposed the flaw.
Other jurisdictions use the same voting equipment made by Dominion Voting Systems, a company that has since been sold and renamed Liberty Vote. Many jurisdictions have applied a software update to fix the flaw, and some other states do not allow the public release of records needed to exploit it, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology.
Georgia, a presidential battleground with one of the nation’s most closely watched U.S. Senate races this year, is the only state where the system is used statewide. Lindeman said that, combined with an open records law that has allowed access to key documents, creates a “perfect storm.”
“It’s really embarrassing that this is still a possibility,” Lindeman said.
How does voting work in Georgia?
Georgia voters make their selections on touchscreen voting machines that print paper ballots, which voters then insert into scanners to tally the votes.
Cast-vote records detail the votes from each ballot. Those records and the electronic ballot images created by the scanners are randomized, but the software flaw allows them to be restored to the order in which they were cast, according to a report by researchers who discovered the issue in 2022.
Combined with other publicly available data, that information could be used to match voters to their ballots, the researchers wrote.
Max Springer, a Princeton University researcher who studies AI and was not involved in the original research, said he gave a publicly available AI assistant that research. He said it was able to reverse the shuffling of electronic ballot records from Georgia’s May primary and then tell him what other records it would need to match names to ballots.
Springer said he then gave the AI assistant the early voting list for the counties he examined and the cast-vote record file, which could be obtained through a public records request. The AI was able to create “buckets of ballots and potential voters,” he wrote in a blog post. In many instances, that made it possible to match voters to their ballots.
In cases where ambiguity remained, Springer wrote, he obtained the public audit log for the ballot scanners and precinct check-in records and was able to match most ballots to specific voters.
“AI coding tools are essentially supercharging laymen people to exploit vulnerabilities,” Springer said in an interview.
Why does ballot secrecy matter?
Georgia’s Constitution says elections “shall be by secret ballot” and state law requires voting machines to “permit voting in absolute secrecy so that no person can see or know any other elector’s votes.”
A lack of ballot secrecy can make it easier to buy or sell votes and increase the danger of coercion by family members, political organizations, employers or government officials. It also can be valuable information for political campaigns.
Gabriel Sterling, special projects manager in the secretary of state’s office, pushed back on those concerns. He said it would be easier to use mail ballots if vote-buying or coercion were the goal and that it likely would be cheaper for campaigns to increase outreach to voters who fit a certain profile than to try to identify voters this way.
State Election Board member Salleigh Grubbs proposed a rule at the board’s August meeting that would have required the secretary of state’s office to apply the software update recommended by the manufacturer by Tuesday.
“Each (voter) has one vote, and no one is entitled to know how it was cast,” Grubbs said. “That privacy protects more than the individual voter. It protects the integrity of the entire election.”
In a letter to the election board, an agency lawyer argued that the update has not been certified by the secretary of state, implementation would take months and the legislature has not provided necessary funding. The board rejected Grubbs’ proposal. Some members said they did not believe they had the authority to order the secretary of state to act and they raised concerns about the short timeline before the November midterms.
Board member Sara Tindall Ghazal, who voted against the proposal, said it is “intensely frustrating” that the software update has not been applied. But she noted that it is a felony to reveal how someone voted, which should serve as a deterrent.
“I hate the fact that it’s even physically possible, but there are very, very severe penalties if somebody were to actually do this,” she said.
What’s being done?
The secretary of state’s office sent guidance to county election officials instructing them to refer open records requests for certain records to the secretary of state’s office. It will release those records with the problematic information blacked out and decline to release other information and documents.
Sterling said the office is working with a vendor to scramble the original order of ballot images and cast-vote records before they are made public. Halderman said that precaution would be necessary to keep someone from reconstructing the order.
While some other jurisdictions have applied the software update that reportedly fixes the problem, others have restricted public access to the records needed to exploit the flaw—an approach Georgia is now trying.
Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, which advocates for election transparency and security and raised the alarm about the vulnerability, argued that withholding documents is not the solution and that steps should be taken to ensure ballots cannot be traced to voters in the first place.
“When Georgia’s election records contain identifiers that can be used to trace ballots to voters, the only legal and acceptable answer is to stop recording that information — not restrict public access to sensitive unlawful information to insiders and commercial vendors,” she said.
With time growing short before the elections, Marks said a workable interim solution would be to collect ballots in locked boxes at precincts and then shuffle and scan them at a central tabulating center.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.
Source: fortune.com
