by Maya Homan, Georgia Recorder, [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]
October 1, 2026
A last-minute proposal that would have required poll workers to manually “shuffle” ballots before scanning them in an effort to prevent bad actors from identifying how Georgia residents voted failed to advance Thursday at a special-called meeting of the State Election Board.
Election workers and advocates said the proposed rule would be impossible to implement before the November midterms and would likely create more problems than it solved.
State Election Board member Salleigh Grubbs, a top Georgia GOP official who was appointed to the board last year, argued that emergency rules were needed to uphold Georgia’s constitutionally required ballot secrecy rules. Her proposal would require voters to place their completed ballots into “secure boxes” rather than ballot scanners, which voters use to submit their printed ballot. Under Grubbs’ proposal, ballots would later be scanned by poll workers rather than the voters themselves.
Thursday’s meeting was called to consider Grubbs’ proposal.
“We cannot continue on the same path with these kinds of vulnerabilities,” Grubbs said. “It must be addressed before the November election so that we can continue on to secure all future elections.”
But other members of the board appeared more skeptical. Janelle King, the board’s vice chair, said she worried that the proposal would likely generate more fear and distrust among voters.
“I also have major concerns about dropping our ballots into a secured box and then having other individuals scan my ballot,” she said. “How do I know that in the shuffling something doesn’t fall out?”
Anne Dover, the Cherokee County elections director, raised concerns that counties could struggle to recruit poll workers if the proposal were approved.
“Elections officials are put in a very difficult position,” she said. “We’ve been accused of fraud. We’ve been accused of being criminals. Our poll workers have been accused of doing things they shouldn’t do, and this atmosphere just gets worse for us as elections officials and poll workers. And I’m afraid we will lose poll workers if something like this is mandated, because they’re going to feel that pressure not to make a mistake.”
The change would also be extraordinarily expensive for counties, Dover said. Cherokee County’s policies mandate that at least three poll workers be assigned to monitor ballots. The cost of hiring enough poll workers to have three people monitoring ballots at every early voting location across the county, she said, would require an extra $80,000 for the midterm elections.
Ballot images have been public record in Georgia since 2021, and records dating back to 2024 are available online at the secretary of state’s website. In August, a Princeton University researcher claimed that he was able to use artificial intelligence to tie thousands of voters to specific ballots with relative certainty by putting publicly available data through an AI tool.
In July, Election Director Blake Evans issued guidance to county election workers instructing them to redact ballot record numbers before uploading them to the secretary of state’s website to prevent ballots from being traced back to specific voters. At Thursday’s meeting, VotingWorks executive director Ben Adida, whose company also manufactures election equipment, said the secretary of state’s office had successfully addressed election security concerns.
But some election activists have maintained that Georgia’s system contains critical security issues and are urging the state to take action ahead of the midterm elections. Early voting begins on Oct. 13.
Last week, the Georgia Republican Party and Republican National Committee penned a joint letter to the board raising concerns about Georgia’s voting equipment software in light of the Princeton researcher’s findings and also called on the board to “seek any federal technical assistance required to complete a certified upgrade” of the state’s voting equipment.
On Monday, members of the board approved a resolution urging the secretary of state’s office to update the state’s voting machine software and calling on the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Homeland Security to step in to ensure that the update takes place.
But Carolyn Roddy, the board’s GOP appointee and sponsor of the resolution, said she shared board members’ concerns about ballot secrecy, but that Grubbs’ proposal went too far.
“I’m not in favor of putting election officials through the ringer on this thing,” she said Thursday. “I think that it will cause incredible conflict that will deter us from other missions.”
Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jill Nolin for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com.