Capitol Beat is a nonprofit news service operated by the Georgia Press Educational Foundation that provides coverage of state government to newspapers throughout Georgia. For more information visit capitol-beat.org.

A federal court judge has dismissed a lawsuit seeking to stop Georgia from using electronic voting machines.

Monday’s ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg ends a long-running legal dispute that predated the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, which prompted a flurry of challenges from Republicans claiming widespread election fraud after Democrat Joe Biden defeated then-President Donald Trump in the Peach State. None of those cases prevailed.

The lawsuit over Georgia’s voting machines was filed back in 2017 by several individual voters represented by the Coalition for Good Governance, a ballot-security advocacy group. When the state spent $104 million to replace its voting machines with a new system in 2019, the group transferred the case to that new system.

The lawsuit questioned the security and reliability of the voting machines. But in Monday’s ruling, Totenberg declared the plaintiffs had not shown any proof that they had suffered legal harm because of the technology.

“From day one, we knew these accusations were meritless,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wrote in a statement released Monday night. “Our local election officials are professionals. And the voters of this state know that their votes are counted securely, accurately, and quickly.”

The machines the state bought from Dominion Voting Systems in 2019 feature touchscreens and optical scanners that record a paper print-out of a voter’s completed ballot. The General Assembly passed legislation last year to remove QR codes – which had been found to confuse some voters – from those paper backups.

Capitol Beat is a nonprofit news service operated by the Georgia Press Educational Foundation that provides coverage of state government to newspapers throughout Georgia. For more information visit capitol-beat.org.