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A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by the Trump administration seeking to obtain personal information about Georgia voters, and the state agency that sets election procedures did not pursue a proposed emergency rule concerning ballot secrecy.

At a special meeting of the State Election Board on Thursday, board members said they opposed a proposal by one member who sought to alter the way ballots are handled by poll workers.

Board member Salleigh Grubbs said she wanted to protect voter secrecy by having poll workers scan the ballots rather than allowing voters to do it themselves, which is the current procedure.

Her rule would have required voters to drop their ballots into secure boxes that poll workers would have emptied into scanners later, after shuffling the order of the ballots.

The proposal was intended to patch a known privacy hole in Georgia’s voting system. The flaw could allow observers armed with artificial intelligence to combine distinct public records in a way that links voters to their ballots.

Voter check-in records and ballot images are public documents, but the link between the two must by law be severed to maintain voter privacy.

A voter activist has contended that new AI tools combined with a preexisting weakness in Georgia’s voting system could empower malefactors to determine how people voted, potentially using that information to coerce voters into selecting preferred candidates.

Voting technology experts have confirmed the flaw exists.

A voter’s identity is supposed to be kept separate from the ballot record, but a seemingly random number remains on the digital record of the ballot.

The number can be decoded to deconstruct the order in which ballots were scanned.

Because records that show when voters checked into their polling places are public — and sequential — the two pieces of the puzzle can theoretically be assembled into a picture that links voters to their ballots, although check-in order does not always correlate with scanning order.

“To keep the published record anonymous, ballot scanners shuffle the electronic records randomly before releasing them. But a security vulnerability disclosed back in 2022 shows the shuffle can be reversed, and some states have not applied the software update that resolves it,” Princeton University researcher Max Springer wrote in a university technology blog in August.

Georgia is among those states, he wrote.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has already taken steps to address the flaw by restricting public access to some pieces of the puzzle.

Technical expert Ben Adida said at Thursday’s virtual meeting that the weakness in Georgia’s voting system is real and serious and needs to be addressed, but he said Raffensperger’s approach was technically good enough for now.

Adida, the executive director of VotingWorks, which makes election equipment, added that updating the voting machine software now to improve the randomization feature would introduce a far greater danger of election chaos.

He said it would be like updating the operating system on an iPhone before a big meeting.

“In my opinion, it’s far too risky to consider,” he said.

But he also acknowledged he was not a legal expert.

And Grubbs, a Republican appointee to the five-member board, contended that the countermeasures by Raffensperger, also a Republican, violate state transparency laws.

“We’re talking about legal issues of compromising constitutional and codified ballot secrecy and a quote unquote mitigation plan that the secretary came up with that is frankly illegal,” Grubbs said.

She also contended that Raffensperger’s solution to protect ballot secrecy was flawed and thus could lead to lawsuits over the constitutionality of the election result.

A local election chief said at the meeting that Grubbs’ proposal was impractical to implement just weeks ahead of the election.

Anne Dover, the election director in Cherokee County, told board members that to shuffle and scan ballots she would have to find and train 126 additional poll workers for Election Day plus 21 for early voting.

There is not enough time or money, she said, noting that her department’s training concludes Friday and that many counties have already finished theirs. Dover worried about inadequately trained poll workers mishandling ballots.

She also worried that voters would be suspicious about the handling of their ballots by anyone but themselves.

“I don’t want y’all to set us up for failure by putting this on us so last minute,” Dover said.

Board members Janelle King and Carolyn Roddy, both GOP appointees, said they opposed Grubbs’ measure.

“I’m not in favor of putting election officials through the wringer,” Roddy said.

Grubbs had asked to place her proposal on the agenda for a meeting Monday, but that did not occur.

The contract for the current voting system is due to expire soon, and state Rep. Victor Anderson, R-Cornelia, co-chairman of a joint House-Senate committee that is selecting the standards for a replacement system, sent Grubbs an email before the meeting advising against her emergency rule.

Anderson questioned whether the election board had the authority to amend the voting procedures as extensively as she proposed. Current law requires the use of scanners to process ballots.

“The proposed rule would continue to utilize scanners, but it substantially changes the process by which in-person ballots reach those scanners,” he wrote.

But Marilyn Marks, the voter activist who collaborated with Grubbs on the proposed rule, told board members that failure to pass it could invite post-election challenges.

“Are we going to do what’s easy and convenient and doesn’t cause too much of a burden, or are we going to do what’s legal?” she asked.

It might be easy to stay the course, said Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance. “It’s not going to be so easy when we start seeing threats to seize the machines that are creating this problem or seeing post-election challenges. Those will get really messy, and it will not be so easy.”

Marks said in a brief interview afterward that she feared the inaction by some board members was intentional.

“The MAGA members want chaos,” she said.

In an unrelated decision that also involved voter privacy, a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit seeking unredacted voter records in Georgia.

Voter names are public, but the state maintains additional personal information attached to those records, including birth dates, driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers.

The federal government wanted that additional information to match identities against databases that could help determine the eligibility of registered voters, such as by checking their immigration status.

U.S. District Judge Victoria Marie Calvert of the Northern District of Georgia determined that Congress never intended for the federal laws referenced by the Justice Department to preempt states’ voter privacy laws.