Princeton researcher shows AI can link Georgia voters to their ballots

Voting-system overhaul requests went unanswered for three years

Max Springer, a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, reported reconstructing the voting sequence for 1.52 million ballots — 98.9% of in-person ballots cast across 114 of Georgia’s 139 counties — using AI analysis of public election records and an early-voting list he obtained through an Open Records Act request. The state’s elections board convened an emergency meeting Thursday, less than two weeks before early voting begins in the midterm that will determine control of the US Congress. “Within a couple of hours, I had a pipeline to analyze and identify secret ballots across the state of Georgia and the agent told me exactly what further information it would need to identify real voters’ ballots,” Springer wrote. “At no point did the agent refuse to comply or raise concerns over implementing the exploit.”

In tiny Heard county, Springer’s model matched the majority of 650 early in-person voters to a specific ballot, with the remaining voters matched “to within a single swap.” He wrote: “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 said he has never been to Georgia.

The vulnerability exploits how Georgia’s ballot-scanning tabulators assign unique identifiers to each cast ballot. The IDs were added to prevent election workers from “double-stuffing” tabulator machines — a concern that gained political weight after the 2020 presidential election. When ballot order is paired with sign-in data from polling places or external surveillance imagery such as Flock cameras, the sequence can be linked back to named voters.

Election security researchers had discovered a similar flaw roughly four years ago, Springer wrote.

At Thursday’s emergency meeting, Georgia Secretary of State spokesperson Robert Sinners said his office had warned the legislature about the flaw for three years, requesting appropriations to overhaul the voting software. “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.” Tim Fleming, the Republican nominee for secretary of state and the governmental affairs committee secretary on the receiving end of many of those requests, did not respond to a request for comment.

Outgoing Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger responded by locking down tabulation data and ordering any public release to redact ballot ID numbers after each election. Ben Adida, an MIT-trained cryptographer and founder of the election technology nonprofit VotingWorks, told the board the change “substantially address[es] this flaw.” Raffensperger has remained a top target of Donald Trump since refusing to overturn his 2020 defeat in Georgia.

Board member Salleigh Grubbs challenged the redaction as violating state transparency law and circulated an alternative proposal that would have poll workers hold ballots in a tray for voters to cast into the machine, shuffling the printed pages out of order to defeat the pattern. Other board members, including conservative Republican Janelle King, dismissed the shuffling approach as impractical and likely to introduce new problems. “We are asking our election officials to completely retrain everybody that has been a part of this process up until this point on how to administer the election,” King said. “I also have major concerns about dropping our ballots into a secured box and then having other individuals scan my ballot. How do I know that in the shuffling something doesn’t fall out?”

Georgia law creates competing imperatives: the state constitution explicitly requires a secret ballot, while revisions driven by the 2020 election disputes mandate transparency for public election records. Other states using Dominion voting software have either patched their systems or withhold vulnerable data from public inspection.

With early voting set to begin within two weeks, Sinners said additional procedural changes now would arrive “a day late and about $30m short.”