Security Vulnerability in a Voting System

It’s a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools.

Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia (one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners) in the recent May 2026 primary.

Notably, I never touched a voting machine, exploited a network, examined source code, or accessed anything non-public.

After pointing a coding agent to the original vulnerability paper, I supplied it with two data sources highlighted in the paper: the early-voting list for each county, and the “CVR” (cast-vote record) file, containing every ballot and its selections (but not the voters’ names or other identifying information). The CVR file is available upon request, precisely because a public, ballot-level record is what makes election results independently verifiable.

Posted on September 4, 2026 at 7:09 AM3 Comments

Comments

Grima Squeakersen September 4, 2026 8:31 AM

My understanding is that, legally, voting (that is: who cast a vote; and under what circumstances) is intended to be public information, not private. If that understanding is correct, an exploitation of what you describe for a nefarious purpose would seem to be more accurately characterized as a potential flaw in the basic system design for voting, rather than a vulnerability in a particular technical system.

Doug September 4, 2026 9:58 AM

@Grima, the issue is that while it is public information that I voted, my actual vote is private. This exploit allows you to know my vote. I live in GA in a small county. If my neighbor’s wife votes dem and her husband is deep deep red MAGA, and discovers her vote, it can easily lead to family drama. Given tbe south’s long history of voter intimidation, this defect is a big problem.

Andy September 4, 2026 10:50 AM

Please read the post: the leak is the order of voting, not the content. I.e. you can figure out than Abe then Ben then Carol voted. If you know when Abe and Carol voted, you can deduce the interval when Ben voted as well

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