Georgia election board demands DOJ probe its machines, requests no probe of ballot-secrecy hole Princeton just proved real

…(cont) Except it isn't anybody's car. It's registered to me, at my address, which is public record if you know where the county clerk keeps the rolls. And if somebody also happens to have, say, a gym check-in four exits up at 7:40 — also a timestamp, also a public-adjacent record sitting in some other file — well, now you've got two facts that are each nothing on their own and together are a Tuesday in my life. Neither record was built to identify me. Put side by side, they manage fine.

I bring this up because a researcher at Princeton just showed the state of Georgia something along those lines, except it wasn't tollbooths, it was ballots. I wrote it down — hang on — here: public election records, the kind anybody can request, run through an AI model, can apparently be combined to connect a specific person to the specific vote that person cast. Secret ballot, right there on the page, not so secret anymore. The Guardian had Georgia's own State Election Board calling an emergency meeting over it this week. So I don't think I'm the only one who read that twice.

Now here's the part I keep coming back to, from a different angle each time, and I apologize for that. On Wednesday, the executive director of that same board, a man named James Mills, sent a letter. Not to Georgia's own people — to the U.S. Department of Justice. To Attorney General Todd Blanche, to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, and to the Homeland Security Secretary, a fella named Markwayne Mullin. One month before the election — did I get that right? Let me check... yes. One month before. Asking them to come look at the voting machines.

Specifically — I wrote this part down too — asking for "additional security measures" and a six-month deadline to eliminate QR codes on the ballots, because right now that's how Georgia's machines read and tally a vote. That's the ask. That's the whole ask. Nothing in it, far as I can find, about who can later find out which box you checked.

So somewhere in Atlanta there's a letter asking the federal government to investigate how the machines count the vote, mailed the same week a Princeton researcher published, and this board's own emergency meeting addressed, a demonstrated way to connect a person to their ballot after the fact. Does the letter mention that part? I keep looking — it's around here somewhere, same pile as the dog's leash — and near as I can tell, no. The letter's about counting. Not about secrecy. Those are different problems, aren't they?

Maybe that's nothing. Maybe you ask the Justice Department to look into the thing you asked them to look into, and somebody else entirely handles the other thing — the one where your name ends up attached to your vote instead of just your precinct's total.

Say — before you let me go — who exactly did the board ask to look into that one?