Judge Amy Totenberg of the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Monday that Georgia will be permitted to go forward with the use of its electronic voting machines, despite security warnings from voting technology experts.

The ruling comes in a 2017 lawsuit filed by Georgia voters and election security organizations who argued that the current machines used in Georgia, called direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, were untrustworthy, insecure, and vulnerable to “malicious intrusion and manipulation of the system and voter data by nation states and cyber savvy individuals.”

Totenberg found that the plaintiffs had presented sufficient evidence that their votes cast on the DRE machines may be “altered, diluted, or effectively not counted on the same terms as someone using another voting method” but that “the eleventh-hour timing of their motions and an instant grant of the paper ballot relief requested could just as readily jeopardize the upcoming elections, voter turnout, and the orderly administration of the election.

Totenberg allowed Georgia to continue to use the machines due to time constraints and concerns of “voter frustration and disaffection” so close to the November election but urged the state to be prepared for 2020.

“Defendants will fail to address that reality if they demean as paranoia the research-based findings of national cybersecurity engineers and experts in the field of elections…The 2020 elections are around the corner,” wrote Totenberg.

Georgia is one of 14 states [NPR report] that use these machines that lacking a paper trail for voter verification.

With the 2018 midterm elections less than two months away, voting has been a highly contested issue in federal courts across the country. Just this month courts have heard a number of issues regarding both elections security and pertaining to voting methods in general. On the same day as Totenberg’s ruling, a district judge in Texas dismissed [JURIST report] a lawsuit challenging Texas’ voter ID law, in light of the Fifth Circuit Court’s April ruling upholding the law as constitutional. In Arizona last week, the Ninth Circuit ruled [JURIST report] that Arizona ballot collection laws were Constitutional—the election practice at issue was Arizona’s requirement for people who cast votes in-person to do so in the precinct they were assigned. On September 7 a judge in a Florida district court ordered [JURIST report] 32 Florida counties to provide sample Spanish language ballots in order to help Spanish-speaking citizens vote. President Donald Trump issued an executive order [JURIST report] on September 12 directing federal agencies to investigate instances of interference with US elections and to take measures against those involved.