Overview
- This week the State Election Board’s executive director, James Mills, sent a formal letter to the Justice Department and other federal officials asking for a review, an investigation, a required software update before November, a ban on QR-code-based tabulation, and a six-month deadline to replace the system.
- Mills also accused Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of restricting or altering access to election records and asked the DOJ to hold state officials accountable if those claims are validated.
- The five-member board is publicly split over the request, with three Republican-backed members supporting federal help and two members, including the chair and the board’s lone Democrat, opposing eleventh-hour federal intervention.
- Election security experts and county officials warned that rushed software updates or procedural fixes—such as collecting and shuffling ballots—could cause errors, confuse poll workers, and disrupt voting if implemented just weeks before early voting starts on Oct. 13.
- The dispute revives a 2022-identified flaw that can reorder ballots and scanner images so they could be matched to voters when combined with other data, and the controversy now raises legal, reputational, and operational questions for a key battleground state while the DOJ has not yet acted.