Controversial GA Sec. of State Raffensperger Can Remain a Republican

Last week delegates at the Georgia Republican convention in Dalton passed a resolution that would not allow controversial Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to qualify as a Republican for elected office. The most compelling reason was that he “does not have the faith and confidence of the Georgia Republican Party.”

By Tuesday Georgia Republican Party chairman Josh McKoon changed his tune and indicated that the party would allow Raffensperger on the 2026 ballot, noting to do otherwise would be of questionable legality.

In April 2025, Judge Amy Totenberg of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta ruled in favor of Raffensperger in Curling v. Raffensperger, a lawsuit first filed in 2017 that had meandered its way through the courts for years.

“We are deeply disappointed by the Court’s ruling that the Plaintiffs lack standing to pursue our case. We believe this is a serious misinterpretation of the law,” Marilyn Marks, Executive Director of the Coalition for Good Governance, said at the time. “The Court did not reach the merits of the case — including the extensive evidence presented by many of the nation’s leading experts showing that Georgia’s touchscreen voting system is insecure and unsuitable for use in public elections.”

The lawsuit predated the big controversy in the aftermath of the 2020 election. When it was initially filed in 2017, it targeted the paperless touchscreen voting machines that Georgia had been using for 15 years. It was then amended to challenge the questionable Dominion system the state bought in 2019, with claims that the new system has similar vulnerabilities.

The claims were based on a thorough report prepared by University of Michigan professor J. Alex Halderman, who showed that the machines have “critical vulnerabilities that can be exploited to subvert all of its security mechanisms, including: user authentication, data integrity protection, access control, privilege separation, audit logs, protective counters, hash validation, and external firmware validation.”

That report led a federal cybersecurity agency to issue an advisory to jurisdictions that use the equipment and prompted Georgian citizens, who noted the deal was suspcicious to begin with, to call for abandoning the machines.

Judge Totenberg cited Halderman’s report several times in the order and said he found “that an attacker could potentially alter ballot QR codes to modify voter selections” and that voters concurrently would “’have no practical way to confirm that the QR codes match their intent,’ even though the QR codes ‘are the only part of the ballot that the scanners count.’”

The lawsuit also led to the exposure of a breach of election equipment in rural Coffee County in south Georgia, which contributed to the charges for several people in the Fulton County 2020 election case that included indictments against President Trump and others.

The Coalition for Good Governance has continued to argue against the electronic system, highlighting this month’s Trump executive order on elections that, among other provisions, requires “a voter-verifiable paper ballot record and not using ballots in which the counted vote is contained within a barcode or QR code.”

“The Court essentially held that voters have no right to know whether the state is actually recording vote as they marked on their electronic ballot, as long as they’re allowed to press buttons on a touchscreen,” one expert noted. “This renders the right to vote an illusion.”

The Georgia General Assembly even passed SB 189 last year to eliminate QR codes from ballots by July 1, 2026.

Raffensperger continues to be at center of a rift within the Georgia Republican Party, angering President Donald Trump and citizens with his actions surrounding the 2020 election.

“And the law of the state of Georgia is pretty clear, with regards to qualifying. So if someone submits the appropriate paperwork, including the loyalty oath, unless there is a case to be made that the loyalty oath would involve false swearing, I don’t really see a way for the Georgia Republican Party to decline someone the opportunity to qualify,” McKoon said shortly after the state GOP convention.

“This is over issues with the mostly Dominion voting machines, his role as the Secretary of State of Georgia,” he said. “This is, I think, a very, relatively popular, amendment or resolution.”

Convention delegate Carter Mitchell of Bibb County indicated he was not anti-machine when it comes to voting, just against Georgia using Dominion voting machines.

A significant portion of the opposition to McKoon’s reelection came from citizens who continue to raise concerns about the state’s voting machines and advocate for the state to switch to hand-marked paper ballots.

Raffensperger has hinted at a Senate run but said he wouldn’t announce his plans for “a few months” in April. Some of the more liberal leaning mainstream media have mentioned in 2026, he may include running for reelection, running for U.S. Senate or for governor of Georgia.

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