U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg, Northern District of Georgia. (Photo: John Disney/ALM)

The federal judge presiding over the legal battle to force Georgia to conduct future elections by paper ballot has turned down a request from plaintiff voters' lawyers for reimbursement of more than $60,000 in court costs.

Judge Amy Totenberg called the requests premature in an order handed down Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. But she denied the requests without prejudice, noting that the lawyers seeking reimbursement may refile when a final judgment is entered.

The requested court costs submitted by three plaintiffs law firms are in addition to a separate, pending motion for more than $5.7 million in legal fees and expenses sought by all the plaintiffs' lawyers.

The firms that asked for reimbursement of their court costs represent one set of plaintiff voters. They include a legal team from the Washington, D.C., offices of Morrison & Foerster led by partner David Cross; two attorneys with Atlanta's Krevolin & Horst; and Atlanta firm Holcomb + Ward, which is no longer involved in the two-year-old case. In a separate motion, they have petitioned the court for more than $3.5 million in fees and more than $337,000 in expenses.

Lawyers representing a second set of voters and the Coalition for Good Governance, a nonprofit election transparency organization, haven't yet asked for reimbursement for their court costs.

But they have asked Totenberg to award them more than $1.4 million in legal fees and nearly $416,000 in expenses. Those lawyers include Atlanta attorney Bruce Brown, Cary Ichter of Atlanta's Ichter Davis, Seattle attorney Robert McGuire, and John Powers and Ezra Rosenberg of the Washington, D.C.-based Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

The pending fee requests cited two Totenberg orders—one last month and one last year—as proof the litigation has resulted in "fail-safe alternatives," beginning Jan. 1, to protect the security and validity of Georgia elections.

Before Totenberg handed down her order denying court costs on Wednesday, Raffensperger's lawyers formally objected to any award of court costs to the plaintiffs lawyers until a final judgment is issued in the case. They have not yet responded to the pending motion for legal fees and expenses.

In Wednesday's order denying the requested court costs award, Totenberg said that her August order barring the state from employing its current obsolete voting equipment after Dec. 31, while appealable, is not a final judgment.

She also noted the plaintiffs are seeking a new injunction that would bar the state from employing the replacement electronic voting system it purchased last summer and that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been marketing aggressively in statewide demonstrations.

On Wednesday, coalition lawyers asked Totenberg for a new injunction barring use of the state's new voting equipment.

They contend the new system—which converts electronic votes to bar or QR codes that are then scanned and tallied—has many of the same vulnerabilities to cyberhackers as the touch-screen voting machines and obsolete election software still in use across the state.

The plaintiffs contend the reliance on technology that is allegedly hackable violates voters' constitutional right "to cast a vote that is properly counted."

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg's order only denied a request for court costs. Her order did not address a separate request for legal fees.