Sarah Amico (left) and Geoff Duncan. (Courtesy photos)

Claiming that “multiple unexplained failures” of the state's electronic voting machines skewed the lieutenant governor's race against Democrat Sarah Riggs Amico, a nonprofit election transparency group and a former candidate for secretary of state have sued to invalidate the election in favor of a do-over.

The suit echoes alarms raised in a separate case brought by the same group over the vulnerability of the state's aging electronic voting system to hackers, viruses and other malfunctions and its lack of any paper audit trail.

The new suit, filed Friday, claims that reported statewide vote totals currently show that voters skipped voting for lieutenant governor more than any other statewide election, including down ballot races for attorney general, labor commissioner, agriculture commissioner and the Public Service Commission.

That pattern was reflected only in votes cast on electronic voting machines but did not appear in paper absentee and provisional ballots, the suit contends.

The drop-off in votes also appeared to have a much greater negative impact on Amico than on her Republican opponent, Lt. Gov.-elect Geoff Duncan, the suit alleges.

Amico is not a plaintiff in the suit. It was filed by Atlanta attorney Bruce Brown on behalf of the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance; Smythe Duval, who lost his bid as the Libertarian candidate for secretary of state; and voters from Fulton and Morgan counties. It is the third lawsuit Brown has filed for the coalition, which is battling to force the state to return to paper ballots as more secure and reliable.

The defendants include acting Secretary of State Robyn Crittenden, Duncan and the election boards of Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties.

A Duncan spokesman wouldn't comment on the suit. Duncan, he said, is focused on his new job as lieutenant governor-elect and the upcoming 2019 legislative session.

The Daily Report is attempting to reach Amico for comment.

“Despite the Plaintiffs' vague, unsubstantiated claims to the contrary, November's election was accurate and secure,” Crittenden said. “Ultimately, we believe that their claims will fail in court, and the integrity of the election system will be affirmed.”

The secretary of state's official election results show Duncan defeated Amico, 51.63 percent to 48.37 percent, or a difference of 123,172 votes out of 3.78 million cast. The higher-profile governor's race drew 159,024 more votes than the lieutenant governor's race.

According to the suit, only 95.7 percent of voters cast ballots for lieutenant governor, while votes cast in all other statewide contests on the same ballot ranged from 97.46 percent for labor commissioner to 99.73 for governor.

The new litigation mirrors complaints Amico raised in a Nov. 12 letter to Crittenden citing discrepancies and errors in recorded election returns in the lieutenant governor's race and calling for an official review. In that letter, Amico reported “significant anomalies” in her race with “an unusually high rate of residual votes, i.e., votes that either were invalid, not recorded, or were never cast in the first place.”

The residual vote in the lieutenant governor's race was 6.5 times greater than the residual vote in the governor's race, Amico reported in her letter. “An analysis reveals that, on average, relatively high Lieutenant Governor residual vote rates appear to impact Democratic-leaning counties more heavily than Republican-leaning counties,” she said.

“If these were not the results from an election, but the laboratory results from an annual physical, such anomalous, elevated results would trigger an immediate phone call from the doctor's office, and a battery of additional tests,” she concluded.

“While the number of residual votes in the Lieutenant Governor's race is unlikely to affect the outcome of my race, more needs to be understood about the functioning of the DRE [digital recording electronic] machines used on Election Day in 2018 to assure the voters of Georgia that their votes were not only duly cast, but fully counted.”

In a Nov. 17 letter, Crittenden declined to review the vote tallies in the race, saying that Amico had not provided “verifiable evidence of discrepancies or errors” to warrant a new election. Crittenden also said that residual votes are not uncommon in an election because voters “are not obligated to cast a vote in each contest.”

The suit claims that the only reasonable explanation for the anomalies in the lieutenant governor's race is “a malfunctioning, erroneous programming, or malicious manipulation of the DRE machines” that cast the election results in doubt.

It also cited evidence presented in ongoing federal litigation that the state's central election server—including confidential voter and electronic pollbook data, passwords and encryption keys —was publicly accessible and potentially compromised for months around the 2016 presidential election and just prior to Election Day this year.

The suit also cited multiple examples of voters who attempted to vote for Amico, only to find the lieutenant governor's race was missing from the ballot, or would not record a vote cast for lieutenant governor or flipped from Amico to Duncan.

“Citizens must not permit flawed elections to stand. Otherwise, our democratic process fails,” Brown said after filing the suit. “Until Georgia election officials commit to conduct fair and verifiable elections, the courts must intervene on behalf of Georgia voters.”

“The anomalies in this race, combined with  the thousands of voters' complaints of malfunctioning machines, erroneous voter registration files, improperly rejected ballots, and irregularities in vote counts, cast tremendous doubt on the election,” said coalition executive director Marilyn Marks.