In August 2017, some Georgia voters filed a lawsuit in state court, alleging that the Georgia vote-counting system is not reliable and the election results are not subject to being audited. Curling v Raffensperger, Superior Court, Fulton County, 2017cv-292233. A few weeks later it was removed to federal court, Curling v Raffensperger, n.d., 1:17cv-02989. It was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg, an Obama appointee.
On May 2, 2023, a five-hour hearing was held to determine if there will be a trial. See this story. One of the reasons the case has taken so long is that in 2019, the Georgia legislature passed HB 316, which provided that all the voting machines should be refigured to produce a ballot marking device, a piece of paper handed to every voter after the voter finishes voting. The paper tells the voter which candidates the voter voted for. Plaintiffs are not satisfied with this modification, because they argue the paper produced by the machine doesn’t necessarily prove that the machine actually recorded the results in conformity to what the paper shows. Instead they want a paper ballot marked by the voter and then read by an optical scanner. With that system, the paper ballots themselves could always be counted by hand, if there were any doubt that the optical scanner had done a good job.
This case is possibly the most complex election law case ever filed, with tens of thousands of pages of documents already filed.
