Georgia elections deputy: 'System is sound, secure and ready for operation'

(The Center Square) — When Georgians head to the polls for November's presidential election, Michael Barnes wants voters to know "that their system is sound, secure and ready for operation."

Barnes, the Georgia Secretary of State Office's deputy director of election and voting systems, spoke with The Center Square recently in Marietta at the Cobb County Elections Office as state officials tested elections systems.

In 2023, elections officials visited all 159 counties in Georgia. Now, state officials are engaged in a "system health check 2.0."

"As we're leading now into the general election when more and more people will be paying attention, we thought it was a good idea to go back out and do a system health check 2.0," Barnes said. "We may not be going to all 159 counties again because we have a much shorter window, but we are going to be visiting a cross-section of counties around the state."

How important is doing exercises like this?

What you want to show time and time and time again — and this is done prior to every election — is the testing and the validation. So, this is just another step in that process. We do it prior to every election, but it's also a good exercise that between elections outside of the normal calendar, [we] continue doing the testing to build that confidence level within the voting system.

How would you say Georgia performs compared to other states in the country in terms of election security?

Well, of course, I'm biased, but ... I feel like Georgia is a leader in the preparation and the execution of elections. We have been doing a statewide model here for over 20 years. There are, I would imagine, 49 other states that [wish] their state elections office was as engaged in the elections process as the state of Georgia is.

What do you do after the election in terms of looking at how systems performed? Would you come back and say, here's what we learned and here are some potential changes for the next election?

With every election, we learn something. What normally happens after a November election is that's when you have legislative change, and that legislative change comes about because of the previous experience. With every election, you learn something new; you prepare for that instance that you experienced previously. The problem is we don't know what the future holds, so there may be a new experience that we have to go back, reassess and prepare for again.

As these exercises continue, will they increase confidence moving forward and possibly eliminate some of the concerns people have?

It is certainly our hope that it does. Everybody will always have their opinions on how they think systems operate. But what we can point to is our record of testing, not once, twice, but multiple times, throughout the years, throughout the decade, and every time that testing has been done, it's been found to be accurate.