Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (left) is represented by John Salter of The Barnes Law Group, Marietta.

Junking Georgia's antiquated electronic voting machines in favor of an immediate return to paper ballots “would compromise Georgia's 2018 election,” an attorney for Secretary of State Brian Kemp contended Tuesday.

In a sharply worded response to a motion filed by a Colorado-based coalition and Georgia voters asking a federal judge to order the state to convert to paper ballots before early voting begins in October, Kemp attorney John Salter challenged contentions that it can be accomplished easily, if at all. The requested conversion to paper ballots would require new equipment, software, significant poll worker training and additional funding, he argued.

Salter, of The Barnes Law Group in Marietta, also referenced Georgia's infamous experience with paper ballots in the state's 1946 election, where the dead of Telfair County voted in alphabetical order on forged paper ballots, precipitating a state constitutional crisis that led to three candidates all claiming to be the rightfully elected governor.

“At this late date, converting to an exclusively paper ballot election cannot be done without compromising the public interest,” Salter said. “Plaintiffs are naive to think paper ballots do not have trade-offs and problems, just of different types, gravities and levels of risk. … No election system is flawless.”

Kemp has appointed a bipartisan commission to make recommendations next year to the Georgia General Assembly to modernize the current election infrastructure, Salter added. “The issue is not whether Georgia should soon update a voting system first implemented in 2002, but whether the elections system we need for November 2018 will be plunged into chaos,” he said.

Citing alarms raised by federal security officials that states, including Georgia, have already been targeted by Russian hackers, the Colorado-based Coalition for Good Governance warned in papers filed in federal court in Atlanta that Georgia's voting infrastructure has already been compromised and that, absent a return to paper ballots, the legitimacy of the November election results “will be cast into doubt.”

Atlanta attorney Bruce Brown represents the coalition along with Cary Ichter of Atlanta's Ichter Davis; William Ney of Atlanta's Ney Hoffecker Peacock & Hayle; and Seattle attorney Robert A. McGuire. David Cross of Morrison & Foerster in Washington, D.C., represents several individual Georgia voters who are also plaintiffs.

In asking  Judge Amy Totenberg of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia for an injunction mandating an immediate return to paper ballots, Brown argued that Georgia's computerized voting infrastructure is nearly two decades old and has no paper audit trail to verify the accuracy of the ballots cast. Microsoft terminated technical support and security patches in 2013 for the software the state currently relies on to tally votes, he said.

Brown said at least two cybersecurity analysts accessed confidential voter and election data housed under contract with Kennesaw State University's Center for Election Systems three months before the 2016 presidential election. Although the analysts alerted KSU, the names, addresses, driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers of an estimated seven million voters remained exposed for another seven months, Brown said.

A spokesman for Kemp, who Georgia's Republican nominee for governor, insisted the analysts accessed “a misconfigured server” that contained public voter lists, training materials and historical voting data.

In arguing to maintain the continued use of the state's touch screen voting machines, Salter said going from an election where less than 10 percent of the ballots cast would be paper to 100 percent would involve “significant logistical challenges, procurement of new equipment and hardware, new administrative regulations, new polling place design” that would “cost money that has not been budgeted for this year's elections.”

Although the plaintiffs suggested that optical scanners could be used to count potentially millions of paper ballots in the fall, Georgia has only 891 of the devices designed for low volume work that would likely break in a high volume environment, Salter contended.

Salter also argued, “There is not sufficient time” to make the conversion. Election officials in Georgia's 159 counties “have already made decisions and expended resources planning for the general election based on the existing early voting schedule and the established elections apparatus and procedures,” he said.

Gwinnett County voting officials estimated in an affidavit filed with the response that converting to paper ballots would cost them an additional $550,000 to $825,000.

Attorneys for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, also a defendant in the suit, said in a separate response that the county does not have enough optical scanners to count all the ballots expected in November. The cost of procuring and deploying an adequate number “would carry excessive and unbudgeted cost,” the county contended. “It is even questionable whether enough compatible [optical scanners] are available as they are no longer manufactured.”

Salter also shot down a separate suggestion by the noncoalition member plaintiffs that the state could mass mail absentee paper ballots to all registered voters with prepaid postage to encourage paper ballot use, arguing it would cost about $13.4 million to send absentee paper ballots to Georgia's 6.7 million registered voters. Nor is there any guarantee that printing vendors could fulfill such a large request.

“There is no Paper-Ballot Fairy who, with magic wand at ready, can save plaintiffs' half-baked 'plans' from devolving into fiasco,” he concluded.