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Reversible ballot shuffles exposed the order of 98.9% of Georgia primary ballots

blog.citp.princeton.edu 16 min read Editor score 8/10

The author says a reversible scanner-record shuffle and public voting logs let them reconstruct the order of 98.9% of in-person ballots in Georgia’s May 2026 primary; some states had not applied the fix. It shows how metadata can undermine ballot anonymity.

What
An attack reversed ballot scanners’ deterministic random-number shuffle to recover the order of ballots cast in Georgia’s May 2026 primary.
How
Pairing recovered order with public voter-cast logs can map ballots to voters; the author reports reconstructing 98.9% of in-person ballot order.
Why it matters
Coding agents can turn a known vulnerability into a working exploit, making patching and privacy reviews against auxiliary data important.
assign number reverse shuff… match ballots cast order ballot scanners public logs electronicballot records sequence voters
Reversing ballot labels and matching the recovered sequence with public logs can expose voter-ballot links. Sketched from the article's own text.

Read on blog.citp.princeton.edu → Hacker News · 37 comments

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