Georgia holds emergency meeting over AI reconstructing voters' secret ballots

Max Springer, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, used a $20 AI large language model subscription and data obtained through public records requests to build a process for analyzing Georgia's secret ballots, and said the agent never refused to cooperate or raised concerns. Using early voting lists and county cast vote record files, he reconstructed the voting order of a total of 1.52 million ballots in 114 of the 139 counties he examined, accounting for 98.9% of in-person voting in those counties; in Heard County, which has fewer voters, the agent matched most of the 650 early in-person voters to specific ballots. Georgia's State Election Board held an emergency meeting over this, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ordered that ID numbers be redacted when ballot data is made public, and VotingWorks founder Ben Adida said this "basically resolves the flaw." Board member Salleigh Grubbs proposed having polling station workers shuffle paper ballots before scanning them, which was questioned by other members for creating new operational problems.