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Princeton Study Shows How Bad Actors Can Exploit Georgia Elections To Expose How You Voted

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Princeton Study Shows How Bad Actors Can Exploit Georgia Elections To Expose How You Voted

A Princeton researcher just proved that Georgia’s ‘secret’ ballots can be matched to individual voters using nothing but publicly available records.

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A new analysis from Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy shows that a capable analyst — or even an ordinary AI model — 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.

Using publicly available data from the state’s May 2026 primary, researcher Max Springer 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.

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 — some linkages can be made with near certainty, others with lower confidence — but a talented programmer or AI user can still perform substantial voter profiling.

In small towns and close-knit communities, the risks of exposure are obvious. Parents could identify teachers’ ballots. Employees could face pressure from employers, or bias from potential employers. Even people who never face overt pressure could still experience quiet discrimination. 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.

Many people assume that election officials are supposed to be able to know how individuals voted. They are not. Georgia law requires “absolute secrecy” of the ballot. While election officials must handle anonymous ballots, the system also must not allow anyone — including poll officials, election boards, or the state’s vendors — to determine how any particular voter cast their ballot.

The ability to reconstruct individual voting........

© The Federalist