{"id":2641276,"date":"2026-08-06T08:51:59","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T12:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignprinceton-study-shows-how-bad-actors-can-exploit-georgia-elections-to-expose-how-you-voted\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T09:11:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T13:11:40","slug":"utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignprinceton-study-shows-how-bad-actors-can-exploit-georgia-elections-to-expose-how-you-voted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignprinceton-study-shows-how-bad-actors-can-exploit-georgia-elections-to-expose-how-you-voted\/","title":{"rendered":"Princeton Study Shows How Bad Actors Can Exploit Georgia Elections To Expose How You Voted"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">30<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Futm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignprinceton-study-shows-how-bad-actors-can-exploit-georgia-elections-to-expose-how-you-voted%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2641276&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The Princeton University\u2019s Center for Information Technology Policy has uncovered a meaningful vulnerability in Georgia&#8217;s voting system. Researchers demonstrated that, using publicly available data and common analysis techniques, they could reconstruct the order in which ballots were scanned and, by combining this with other records, potentially identify how individual voters cast their ballots. This exposes the supposed secrecy of ballots, especially with early voting data, which shows that voters\u2019 choices could be linked back to them in small communities.<\/p>\n<p>This threat raises concerns about voter privacy and security, as individuals could face pressure, discrimination, or intimidation based on their voting choices. The problem is compounded by prior data breaches and security flaws within Georgia\u2019s election infrastructure, including exposed voter records and predictable scanner identifiers.A known vulnerability from 2022 involving the scanner record IDs allowed researchers to recover the scanning order, violating Georgia law on ballot secrecy.<\/p>\n<p>Although recent measures, such as a 2026 directive to strip identifying data from public records, attempt to address this issue, the underlying problem persists because internal systems still retain traceable data, and the fix does not prevent potential misuse. The <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >correct solution involves proper data sanitization-randomizing record identifiers<\/a> at creation to preserve auditability while ensuring voter privacy. While a patch to prevent predictable ID generation exists but has yet to be installed,ongoing risks remain,especially since a large portion of ballots in recent elections were processed on vulnerable systems.<\/p>\n<p>georgia\u2019s constitutional requirement for a secret ballot emphasizes that secrecy and the ability to verify election results are both essential and interconnected. Leaving traceable data intact inside official systems without proper safeguards risks undermining both voter privacy and trust in the electoral process. The challenge is weather the state will implement comprehensive fixes that safeguard voter anonymity and election transparency or continue managing only the surface symptoms of deeper vulnerabilities.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.citp.princeton.edu\/2026\/08\/03\/an-algorithmic-failure-beneath-the-secret-ballot\/\">new analysis<\/a> from Princeton University\u2019s Center for Information Technology Policy shows that a capable analyst \u2014 or even an ordinary AI model \u2014 can reconstruct the order in which most Georgia ballots were scanned and, by combining that order with other ordinary election records, determine how individual voters cast their ballots. <\/p>\n<p>Using publicly available data from the state\u2019s May 2026 primary, researcher <a href=\"https:\/\/www.maxspringer.me\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Max Springer<\/a> demonstrated the technique at scale, recovering the scanning order of roughly 1.5 million ballots (98.9 percent of in-person ballots) across 139 counties. In smaller example jurisdictions, the linkage was nearly complete: in Heard County every one of the 650 early in-person voters could be tied to a specific ballot, and in Ball Ground (Cherokee County) all 1,860 early voters were matched. In other words, the supposedly secret ballot is not nearly as secret as the public has been told.<\/p>\n<p>Early voting compounds the vulnerability. Voters at vote centers come from multiple precincts and often use different ballot styles with different candidate choices. Those differences create additional data points that can improve the ability to isolate individuals inside the Cast Vote Records (the electronic files that list every candidate choice marked on each ballot). Match confidence will vary \u2014 some linkages can be made with near certainty, others with lower confidence \u2014 but a talented programmer or AI user can still perform substantial voter profiling.<\/p>\n<p>In small towns and close-knit communities, the risks of exposure are obvious. Parents could identify teachers\u2019 ballots. Employees could face pressure from employers, or bias from potential employers. Even people who never face overt pressure could still experience quiet discrimination. <\/p>\n<p>Some voters already avoid primaries because they do not want their party preference known. The ability to reverse-engineer candidate choices in a general election would only increase the potential for intimidation and could open the door to a whole new form of doxing.<\/p>\n<p>Many people assume election officials are supposed to be able to know how individuals voted. They are not. Georgia law requires \u201cabsolute secrecy\u201d of the ballot. While election officials must handle anonymous ballots, the system also must not allow anyone \u2014 including poll officials, election boards, or the state\u2019s vendors \u2014 to determine how any particular voter cast his ballot.<\/p>\n<p>The ability to reconstruct individual voting choices \u2014 and potentially disclose them \u2014 raises serious legal concerns under Georgia law, but also carries substantial commercial and political value. In an era when major campaigns routinely spend hundreds of millions of dollars, the ability to know how specific voters actually cast their ballots could be worth millions. <\/p>\n<p>When that information can be assembled across multiple election cycles, the ability to build detailed, long-term voter profiles only grows stronger. That kind of data is useful to campaigns, advocacy groups, and anyone building sophisticated micro-targeting models. An insider at the state or county level with access to the original internal data files could face a clear temptation. The creation of traceable ballots must stop \u2014 while preserving the ability to audit the election.<\/p>\n<p>Those concerns are heightened by the fact that Georgia\u2019s Secretary of State\u2019s office has already experienced multiple serious data exposures and breaches. In 2015, the office distributed voter files containing Social Security numbers, driver\u2019s license numbers, and birth dates for more than 6 million voters (the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.atlantamagazine.com\/news-culture-articles\/behind-the-peachbreach-how-the-secretary-of-states-office-compromised-the-personal-data-of-georgias-registered-voters\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u201cPeachBre<\/a>ach\u201d). In 2016-2017, a server at Kennesaw State University that handled statewide election preparation was <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2017\/06\/georgias-voting-system-is-uniquely-vulnerable-to-election-tampering-hackers\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">found exposed to the internet<\/a>, containing millions of voter records with personal identifying information, election databases, and supervisor passwords. <\/p>\n<p>Additional web portal vulnerabilities in later years have repeatedly risked or briefly exposed personal voter data. Combined with ordinary internet security risks, the traceable ballot-level data that remains inside official systems cannot be treated as securely walled off from potential misuse.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>No Longer a Theoretical Problem<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>The vulnerability Springer exploited was first documented in 2022 by University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman and colleagues. The Record IDs (unique numbers the scanners assign to each ballot as it is scanned) assigned by Dominion\u2019s precinct scanners were generated by a fixed, predictable sequence rather than true randomness. Anyone who understood the flaw and obtained the public files could recover the exact scanning order. <\/p>\n<p>Halderman\u2019s team published a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.usenix.org\/system\/files\/usenixsecurity24-crimmins.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">peer-reviewed paper<\/a> on the vulnerability (named DVSorder) in 2024 and had formally notified Georgia\u2019s state elections director of the problem in October 2022. The researchers also presented their findings at <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/3YO-rErhNVI\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">USENIX Security<\/a>. The <a href=\"https:\/\/storage.courtlistener.com\/recap\/gov.uscourts.gand.240678\/gov.uscourts.gand.240678.1590.1.pdf\">formal disclosure letter<\/a> is part of the public court record.<\/p>\n<p>Within days of the public disclosure, the Coalition for Good Governance formally notified the State Election Board and county officials, warning that the predictable Record IDs created permanent, linkable records in violation of Georgia\u2019s absolute secrecy statutes. On Oct. 19, 2022, the organization submitted proposed emergency rules and amendments aimed at requiring sanitization of public releases and restricting access to the original identifiers.<\/p>\n<p>Georgia\u2019s secretary of state\u2019s office has never publicly acknowledged Halderman\u2019s finding by name. On July 28, 2026, State Elections Director Blake Evans issued an <a href=\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1asuKRSvUErIuHYVXWZ99POhlsoXuZmbb\/view?usp=drive_link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Official Election Bulletin<\/a> requiring counties to stop releasing ballot images directly and to route every public request through a state repository that strips the original Record IDs. Counties must also redact the Record ID column from any Cast Vote Record released to the public. <\/p>\n<p>By stripping the original Record IDs, the bulletin also severs the public audit trail that would otherwise allow independent verification that ballot images match their corresponding Cast Vote Records. The bulletin addresses what the public can obtain. It does not delete or permanently re-randomize the traceable data that continues to exist inside official systems \u2014 data that remains accessible to an untold number of county and state officials, as well as multiple commercial vendors. <\/p>\n<p>Notably, the Secretary of State issued this directive without action by the State Election Board, which currently has a proposed rule on the same subject, advanced by Board Member Salleigh Grubbs.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>The Right Way to Solve the Problem<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>The correct technical solution has been known since Halderman\u2019s original disclosure: adequately randomize the records at creation and never allow them to be identifiable. At the time, the best available remedy was to sanitize the data \u2014 both the versions released to the public and the records retained inside official systems \u2014 so that the recoverable scanning order is destroyed while the ability to match a specific ballot image to its corresponding Cast Vote Record is preserved for auditing purposes. That approach protects voter privacy without eliminating the auditability that the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eac.gov\/sites\/default\/files\/eac_assets\/1\/28\/VVSG.1.0_Volume_1.PDF\">Election Assistance Commission\u2019s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines<\/a> and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nist.gov\/itl\/voting\/cast-vote-records-cvr-subgroup\">NIST Cast Vote Records model<\/a> treat as essential. <\/p>\n<p>Dominion released a patch in <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/1215415241?fl=pl&#038;fe=sh\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">2022<\/a> intended to prevent the predictable Record IDs from being generated in the first place. Georgia <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2023\/06\/14\/politics\/dominion-voting-georgia-vulnerabilities-2024\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">has yet to install<\/a> it. If that patch works as claimed, the underlying problem is eliminated rather than merely partially cleaned up after the fact. Either way, simply restricting public access to the records while leaving the original data intact inside official systems is the wrong remedy.<\/p>\n<p>In the <a href=\"https:\/\/static1.squarespace.com\/static\/5a665c98017db2b60bc22084\/t\/688ba444c83f824110f7f3c2\/1753982020093\/Evans_July+2025.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">November 2024 general election<\/a>, roughly 95 percent of Georgia ballots were scanned on the precinct-level Dominion scanners that carry the Record ID flaw. Mail ballots fall outside that specific problem. A significant share of the vote is therefore exposed to the underlying vulnerability.<\/p>\n<p>Ballot secrecy is not optional. The Georgia Constitution requires that \u201cElections by the people shall be by secret ballot and shall be conducted in accordance with procedures provided by law.\u201d Secrecy and meaningful verification are complementary constitutional requirements, not competing ones. An election system that protects secrecy only by limiting the public\u2019s ability to verify results, while leaving the traceable data in official hands, fails to meet both obligations at once.<\/p>\n<p>Data that could reveal how many Georgians voted already exists. Some data from previous election cycles remains exposed in the public realm. The July 28 bulletin may limit what the public can easily obtain going forward in future elections, but it leaves the underlying problem of a non-secret ballot unaddressed inside the systems controlled by election officials and their commercial vendors.<\/p>\n<p>The question is whether the state will implement the fix that protects voters without sacrificing transparency, or continue managing the symptoms while the traceable data remains available to those who hold or can unlawfully access the records.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Mark Davis is President of Data Productions, Inc., has been working with voter data since 1986, and is a member of the Georgia Republican Party\u2019s Election Confidence Task Force. He has served as an analyst and expert witness in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/georgia-only-goes-after-elected-republicans-election-fraud\/\" title=\"Georgia Only Goes After Elected Re...ans&#039; ... Fraud\">court cases involving disputed elections<\/a> seven times over the last 23 years, and has been invited to offer testimony before subcommittees of the Georgia General Assembly three times since 2020. Follow him @MarkDavisGOP on X.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Princeton finds Georgia ballots can be traced back to voters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2711,"featured_media":2641277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-05-at-3.55.42-PM-1024x600.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[83763,34382,35468,83761],"class_list":["post-2641276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal","tag-election-manipulation","tag-election-security","tag-georgia-elections","tag-voter-privacy"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-05-at-3.55.42-PM-1024x600.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2641276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2711"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2641276"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2641276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2641289,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2641276\/revisions\/2641289"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2641277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2641276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2641276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2641276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}