Two Republicans on Georgia’s state election board Thursday criticized a proposal by their own party to address a flaw in Georgia’s voting equipment that can allow voters to be matched to their ballots after they have been cast.
The software vulnerability does not allow votes to be changed or cast doubt on election results, but it could let someone see how others voted. That’s important because ballot secrecy is a fundamental right under the state constitution and violations could create an opening for legal challenges.
A lack of ballot secrecy also can increase the danger of coercion to vote a certain way by family members or employers.
“Under the state’s system, ballots that display voters’ choices and electronic ballot images created by the scanners that read them are randomized. But the equipment’s software flaw allows them to be put back in the order they were cast”
If I had to guess, is date/time metadata. If you can put the ballots back in order and also have a list of when people finalized their ballot, you could cross reference with enough accuracy to be problematic.
And if you step out all the metadata, how do you prove that ballots weren’t invented or changed?
Certifying changes to voting systems at the federal and then the state level can take years, so I’m not surprised this is taking a while.