AI Tool Could Expose Georgia Voters' Secret Ballots, Researcher Warns

Max Springer, a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, tested the prospect using data obtained through an Open Records Act request. He wrote that within a couple of hours he had a pipeline to analyze and identify secret ballots across Georgia, and that the AI agent told him exactly what further information it would need to identify real voters’ ballots. The agent never refused to comply or raised concerns about the exploit, Springer wrote.

Ballot secrecy is a democratic safeguard that lets voters shield their choices from family, neighbors, and government, The Guardian reported. Springer, who said he has never been to Georgia, used the state’s early-voting list and the cast-vote record file for each county. He said he could recover the voting order for 1.52 million ballots, or 98.9% of in-person ballots, in 114 of the 139 counties he examined.

“In some of Georgia’s counties, I can determine the exact ballot cast by every voter at the vote centers – ballot secrecy is entirely lost,” Springer wrote. In tiny Heard County, where few voters cast ballots on any given day, he said the AI agent matched the majority of 650 early in-person voters to a specific ballot, and the rest to within a single swap.

At the emergency meeting, Ben Adida, an MIT-trained cryptographer and founder of the election technology nonprofit VotingWorks, described how the flaw appears. Election workers record every voter who comes through a polling place. Voters choose candidates on a touchscreen, which prints a paper ballot. The voter feeds that ballot by hand into a scanner to be tabulated. When a voter inserts the ballot, the tabulator creates a digital record known as a cast vote record, or CVR, assigning a unique identifier at the time of scanning. Adida said the identifying information is not actually random enough.

Georgia’s outgoing secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, locked down the tabulation data that someone might use to identify a voter, ordering any public release to redact ID numbers after an election. Adida told the board that the order “substantially address[es] this flaw,” The Guardian reported.

The issue is not entirely new. About four years ago, election security researchers discovered a flaw in software used by Georgia voters that could connect a voter’s identity to a secret ballot. Each ballot has an identifying number because of fears that unscrupulous election workers could double-stuff ballots through tabulator machines. But if ballot order can be paired with other information, such as sign-in data when a voter checks into a precinct or Flock camera imagery showing when someone entered a building on a slow day, then a ballot can be matched to a voter’s name.

Representatives of the secretary of state’s office said they have been seeking help with the problem for three years. They said requests for money have been caught in the long-running political feud between Raffensperger and conservative legislators aligned with Donald Trump and 2020 election skeptics. Raffensperger has remained a top Trump target after refusing to overturn his defeat in the state’s 2020 presidential election, The Guardian reported.

Spokesperson Robert Sinners sent emails and phone records showing requests for an appropriation to upgrade Georgia’s voting system, but the requests were unsuccessful. Governmental affairs committee secretary Tim Fleming, now the Republican nominee for secretary of state, was on the receiving end of many of those requests. “We have presented numerous plans to the legislature for this – not, not just a patch, but an entire overhaul of the software to fix up any known vulnerabilities,” Sinners said. “Guess what we were gifted with from the legislature? A big fat goose egg.”