Lawyers defending Georgia's secretary of state in federal litigation against a sought-after return to paper ballots claim that plaintiff voters engaged in "a deluge of innuendo" in seeking more than $300,000 in sanctions against the state.

Special assistant state attorneys general defending Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger and the state elections board contend the requested sanctions are not warranted because they never refused to hand over the obsolete databases still used by the state to create ballots and tabulate votes.

Instead, Raffensperger's lawyers argued in a response objecting to the proposed sanctions that they were bound by state law from releasing 2018 election ballots designed on the Global Election Management System and were required by law to limit disclosure of "other election-related information" without a court order. The lawyers said they released the sought-after databases after Judge Amy Totenberg of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ordered them to do so in July.

Calling the sanctions motion "unnecessary," Raffensperger's legal team claimed the proposed sanctions were "based on the flawed idea that state defendants failed to comply with their discovery obligations." The state's lawyers insisted they "worked in good faith the resolve the legitimate security concerns … involving the GEMS database."

David Cross—a partner at Morrison Foerster in Washington, D.C., who leads a team of attorneys representing one set of Georgia voters who sued the state—said earlier this month that the plaintiffs have sought sanctions because the state "obstructed and obscured discovery" in " a concerted campaign to mislead us, the court, and the public about the fact that Georgia's election management system is neither unique nor confidential."

In Friday's pleading, Raffensperger's counsel also said that if Totenberg decides sanctions are warranted, she should dramatically reduce the requested amount  to a maximum of $29,451. They also proposed reducing the hourly rate submitted by Cross—who filed the sanctions motion on behalf of two teams of lawyers representing two sets of plaintiffs—from $1,065 to $266, and Atlanta attorney Bruce Brown's rate from $650 to $375.

Cross is lead counsel for one set of Georgia voters, and Brown is co-lead counsel for a second set of plaintiff voters and the Coalition for Good Governance, a nonprofit election transparency organization.

Attorneys for the state also proposed halving hourly fees for plaintiff election cybersecurity expert Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, and paying nothing to at least one other cybersecurity expert employed by the plaintiffs.

State lawyers said the suggested reduction in hourly rates submitted by plaintiffs' counsel were in keeping with their own $225 hourly rate as appointed special assistant state attorneys general. They also argued that the judge should consider that any sanctions would be paid with taxpayer dollars.

The three special assistant attorneys general defending Raffensperger—Vincent Russo and Joshua Belinfante, both partners at Atlanta's The Robbins Firm, and Bryan Tyson, a partner at Atlanta's Taylor English Duma—didn't respond to requests for their professional hourly rates in their private practices.

In seeking sanctions, Cross argued they are warranted because Raffensperger falsely claimed in multiple court pleadings and teleconferences that GEMS—which has been in use since 2002 and is no longer supported by Microsoft—is so unique, confidential and sensitive that even the plaintiffs' cybersecurity experts couldn't be trusted with copies in highly secure environments.

The plaintiffs fought for months to examine the state's GEMS server and databases to determine whether they were infected with malware or otherwise compromised while they were left open on the internet for an undetermined period of time by the Center for Elections at Kennesaw State University before and after the 2016 presidential election. At the time, KSU had a contract with then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, now Georgia's governor, to manage the electronic voting system statewide.

Georgia was one of several states targeted by Russian intelligence officers allegedly seeking to interfere with the election.

State attorneys contend that no malware was detected once the GEMS databases were turned over to the plaintiffs.

The voters' lawyers said that once their cybersecurity experts examined the GEMS databases, they discovered they are exactly like publicly available GEMS databases from other jurisdictions and contained no confidential information. They also said the secrecy the state insisted on for any review of the databases required out-of-state travel by plaintiffs' experts and their lawyers. But the state allowed the same databases to be accessed by three off-site contractors who created the 2018 ballots on their home computers without verifiably secured conditions or confidentiality agreements to safeguard them.

When Totenberg directed the secretary of state to turn over the GEMS databases, she concluded the state failed to provide "practice or reasonable terms" to review and analyze the GEMS databases and the terms they had proposed "would in reality preclude [the] plaintiffs' experts from effectively analyzing the database and its functioning as well as preclude plaintiffs' experts from collecting in writing many of their observations on a real time basis during their review."

In her order, Totenberg also called an analysis of the GEMS databases "highly relevant" to the plaintiffs' claims and a "necessary first step in evaluating security vulnerabilities and flaws in the state GEMS system which have an actual impact on voting tabulations."