The big-ticket races in Georgia, which drew national attention, have been decided — but the battle over the controversial way the state runs its elections rages on. A lawsuit contesting the outcome of the lieutenant governor’s race could provide a rare glimpse into the Peach State’s elections infrastructure and an opportunity to audit its non-transparent voting machines.
The lawsuit, filed by an election integrity group and three Georgia citizens Friday night, will attempt to prove that there were enough irregularities “as to place doubt in the result,” as state law requires for an election contest. At issue are unusual election results that the lawsuit says can only be explained by voting machine malfunctions. To prove that something is wrong, the plaintiffs will need to conduct detailed reviews of the internal memory and programming of DRE voting machines, a level of access that has never been allowed in Georgia.
At the heart of the suit is the reliability of the state’s electronic voting machines and an opportunity to peek under the hood of how former secretary of state and current governor-elect, Brian Kemp (R), ran the elections….
According to the lawsuit, “This is an unprecedented pattern of election results [that] lacks any reasonably plausible innocent explanation.”
The data analyzed by Michael C. Herron, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, shows that the anomalous undervote is limited to ballots cast on DRE machines. On mail-in paper ballots, votes for lieutenant governor failed to be recorded — because the vote was invalid, or there was an error in counting the vote, or a vote wasn’t cast for that race — less than one percent of the time. On DREs used on Election Day, that rate jumped to almost 7.5 percent, a larger jump than for any other race.