How a $20 AI chatbot cracked ballot secrecy for 1.5 million Georgia voters
A Princeton researcher used an AI model and public election records to match 98.9% of in-person ballots to individual voters in dozens of Georgia counties, weeks before the midterms.
What happened: Max Springer, a Princeton postdoc, paid $20 for an AI model subscription, pulled public election files via an open-records request, and built a working pipeline in a couple of hours that could unmask secret ballots. He says the AI never hesitated or raised concerns, instead telling him exactly what additional data it needed. Using that method, Springer says he recovered the voting order for 1.52 million ballots, 98.9% of in-person votes, across 114 of 139 Georgia counties he checked. In small precincts like Heard County, he could match most of the 650 early voters to their exact ballot. Georgia's state elections board called an emergency meeting to respond, with early voting starting in under two weeks.
Why it matters: Secret ballots exist so no one, including employers, family, or officials, can pressure or punish someone for how they voted. This flaw does not require hacking skills or inside access: it works entirely from records Georgia already makes public, and AI just made connecting the dots fast and cheap. The timing is what raises the stakes, since this surfaced right as early voting opens for a midterm that will decide control of Congress, leaving little room for a careful fix.
How it works, plainly: Every scanned ballot gets a cast vote record, essentially a spreadsheet row, with an ID number assigned in the order it was scanned, not randomly enough to hide that order. Cross-reference that sequence with the public sign-in list of who voted and when, and ballots can be lined up with names, especially in low-turnout precincts or with help from sign-in timestamps or camera footage. Security researchers flagged this same weakness about four years ago; AI simply made it trivial to automate across an entire state's records at once.
The rollout: Outgoing secretary of state Brad Raffensperger ordered future public releases of tabulation data to redact the ID numbers, which cryptographer Ben Adida told the board "substantially addresses" the flaw. But board member Salleigh Grubbs argues that redaction violates Georgia's transparency law and instead proposed manually shuffling printed ballots before scanning, an idea other officials called risky and disruptive this close to an election. Georgia's office says it has sought roughly $30 million for a full system overhaul for three years and been refused by the legislature.