Democrats in Georgia have warmed to ditching the state's electronic voting machines - a stunning concession that is sure to infuriate Democrats nationwide.
Since the 2020 election, Democrats have mostly opposed any efforts to ensure that only legal votes are cast. But Georgia Democrats are backing calls from the state's Republicans to replace Dominion voting machines with paper ballots.
The bi-partisan push is a rare example of agreement since the 2020 election deepened partisan divisions on how America should vote.
Democrats were more open-minded about voting machine vulnerabilities before the election, but they have since dismissed vote hacking as a trivial issue that only "conspiracy theorists" care about.
Cybersecurity experts disagree. Some Trump supporters were accused of breaching a Georgia election office in 2021 and copying software from Dominion's machines. Incidents like those show that hacking is a real concern, the experts say.
"If you look at the series of breaches, global breaches of cybersecurity systems over the last two years, it’s story after story like this where some vulnerability in a system was ignored," said Dr. Rich DeMillo, founder of Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity, told 11Alive.
Members of both parties want the state's Republican-controlled election board to make the change.
The chair of the Democrats in Morgan County, Jeanne Dufort, called the use of voting machines "madness" and an invitation to election meddling.
"It's madness, actually, to go into a system and have all of our ballots relying on that," Dufort said.
"We believe the experts who tell us that bad guys, foreign and domestic, are interested in overturning election results or interfering with them. And we absolutely believe they now have really good tools to do that," Dufort said.
The state's election board voted Tuesday to backtrack on new election rules after a liberal group sued, claiming the rules were advanced at an illegal meeting without public notice. Dr. Janice Johnston, a Republican board member, said a public outcry was the result of misleading information.
“There was a weirdly overdramatic and excessive alarm raised — a seemingly coordinated misinformation campaign — followed by apparent media attacks and outrageous and ridiculous threats made to the State Election Board,” she said.
The rules would allow more access for poll watchers and require counties to share daily ballot counts during early voting. The board will debate the rules again on August 6.
