Georgia’s Republican-controlled State Election Board has formally invited the Trump Department of Justice to step in and shut down the Peach State’s unverifiable, QR-code voting system before voters start casting ballots in the 2026 midterms.
In a September 30 letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche, State Election Board Executive Director James Mills asked the DOJ to prohibit the use of “unreadable, unverifiable QR-code-based vote tabulation and any other electronic tabulation method that does not permit the voter to verify the vote that is actually counted,” concerning Georgia’s Dominion voting system, now owned by Liberty Vote USA.
Mills also asked Blanche to set a binding six-month deadline, forcing Georgia to dump the machines and move to a system with voter-verifiable, hand-auditable paper records.
The letter, obtained and published by the Georgia Recorder, was copied to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
According to the Georgia Recorder, the demand follows a September 28 resolution, introduced by GOP appointee Carolyn Roddy and passed 3-2, directing Mills to seek federal help forcing a software fix on the Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5-A system, the same equipment, now branded Liberty Vote, that Georgia rolled out statewide for the 2020 election. Early in-person voting begins October 13.
The letter does not stop at the machines. Mills asks the DOJ to open an investigation into Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office for withholding, blocking review of, and allegedly altering original election records, and for sharing Georgia motor-vehicle and voter-registration data with private vendors including ERIC and the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
He also wants a court-backed order requiring a forensic backup of election-management servers and Dominion scanners, then installation of a later EAC-certified software version, 5.17, 5.20, or newer, before November, with independent verification that CISA-documented vulnerabilities and the so-called DVSorder privacy flaw have actually been fixed.
The QR code is the vote that counts, and the voter cannot read it
Georgia voters make selections on a touchscreen ballot-marking device. The machine prints a paper summary a human can read, then encodes the actual tabulated choices in a QR code the voter cannot decode.
Scanners count the QR code, not the text the voter checked. Mills told Blanche that the setup violates the Help America Vote Act, 52 U.S.C. § 21081, and is inconsistent with Georgia’s own O.C.G.A. § 21-2-379.23(d).
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin already flagged the same problem. In a September 2 letter to Blanche, Mullin said QR-code tabulation may violate HAVA. The State Election Board resolution cites that letter directly.
This is not a new warning. The Gateway Pundit reported in January 2024 that University of Michigan professor J. Alex Halderman hacked a Dominion ballot-marking device in a Georgia courtroom, in front of a federal judge, and changed vote totals using a pen.
The unsealed Halderman report, which Raffensperger’s office sat on for years, found exploitable flaws in nearly every exposed part of the system, including malware that could alter the QR code while leaving the human-readable text untouched.
A later federal ruling in the long-running Curling case acknowledged the obvious: the QR code is what gets tabulated, and voters cannot review it. The case was then tossed on standing.
Raffensperger’s office calls the request “unserious”
Raffensperger spokesman Robert Sinners dismissed Mills’ letter as “unserious” and snapped that “people who are serious about election security don’t inject chaos in the 11th hour,” according to the Georgia Recorder.
He also said the board was “a day late and at least $30 million dollars short,” pointing to a $15 million funding request in the 2025 session that lawmakers never approved. The state says a full replacement, without QR codes, is aimed at 2028.
Board member Janelle King was blunter. “What we’re asking the DOJ to do is to come in and support us in nudging our secretary of state’s office, who is overseeing the federal election as well, to do their job,” she said. Roddy added that it is “irresponsible to have all of us voting on machines that we know have known vulnerabilities.”
Democrat-aligned member Sara Tindall Ghazal and chairman John Fervier, Governor Brian Kemp’s appointee, voted no. Fervier said he has “a fundamental issue with the federal government becoming involved in Georgia elections.” Ghazal argued a full software swap cannot be finished before the midterms.
Kemp already kicked the can. In June he signed a bill delaying the statutory QR-code ban from July 1, 2026, to January 1, 2028, and shifting planning for a new system away from Raffensperger and onto the legislature.
The September 28 resolution and the September 30 letter are the board’s answer: if the secretary of state will not fix a system his own critics, and a DHS secretary, say voters cannot verify, the Trump DOJ should declare the tabulation method unlawful and put a clock on it.
Georgia voters are two weeks from early voting on machines that print a ballot the voter can read and count a code the voter cannot.
You can read the letter below:
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