Judge blasts Georgia officials’ handling of election system

ATLANTA (AP) — A federal judge says Georgia election officials have for years ignored, downplayed, and failed to address serious problems with the state’s election management system and voting machines.

In a ruling Thursday, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg said those problems place a burden on citizens’ rights to cast a vote and have it reliably counted. She called Georgia’s voting system “antiquated, seriously flawed, and vulnerable to failure, breach, contamination, and attack.”

Totenberg devoted much of her 153-page ruling to those shortcomings and a scathing assessment of state officials’ response.

She says problems include: voting machines that have long been problematic; a security lapse that election officials failed to “fully acknowledge or remedy;” questionable security practices surrounding the building of ballots; and a failure to do a cybersecurity review of election-related systems.