Judge Dismisses Curling v. Raffensperger After Eight-Year Legal Battle, Igniting National Debate Over Voting Rights and Ballot Transparency
On April 1, 2025, in a move that sent shockwaves through the election integrity community and social media alike, Federal Judge Amy Totenberg dismissed the long-running Curling v. Raffensperger case—a lawsuit that challenged the use of ballot-marking devices (BMDs) in Georgia elections.
While the timing of the ruling on April Fools’ Day felt ironic to many, there was nothing humorous about the implications. Despite a 17-day trial, damning expert testimony, and mounting public concern, Judge Totenberg ultimately concluded that the plaintiffs—represented by Coalition for Good Governance and Marilyn Marks—lacked legal standing to challenge Georgia’s Dominion-based BMD voting system.
What makes the ruling even more contentious is that Judge Totenberg herself acknowledged critical vulnerabilities in the state’s voting systems, including testimony that showed votes could be altered without detection. Yet, the court held that such concerns were not “legally cognizable injuries” under current federal precedent.
A Case Built on Demonstrable Risk
During the trial, Dr. J. Alex Halderman, a respected election security expert, demonstrated live how malware could manipulate QR codes on ballots—codes that are used for vote tabulation, but cannot be read by the human eye. In essence, voters cannot verify the vote being counted.
Halderman’s demonstrations included:
- Altering vote choices in the QR code without changing the human-readable text
- Accessing and controlling BMD systems using common tools like a ballpoint pen or a $14 smart card
- Installing vote-flipping malware via USB devices
- Documented vulnerabilities that could affect the entire voting system, confirmed by CISA in 2022
Despite these revelations, the judge dismissed the case, ruling:
“Plaintiffs lack standing to pursue their claims because neither of these asserted injuries constitute an invasion of a legally protected interest under governing precedent.”
Standing: The New Legal Shield for Election Systems?
While the plaintiffs previously survived multiple standing challenges—including one in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals—Judge Totenberg cited evolving Supreme Court precedent and higher evidentiary burdens at trial to justify her reversal.
“Plaintiffs do not claim that Georgia’s use of a QR code… prevents the individual Plaintiffs… from voting, dilutes their votes, or prevents their votes from being counted,” she wrote.
The core of her logic: the right to vote does not include the right to verify how your vote is counted.
This interpretation has left legal experts and civil liberties advocates stunned. As Marilyn Marks of the Coalition for Good Governance put it:
“This decision effectively treats the right to vote as merely the right to cast a ballot, not the right to know what vote is being cast and counted.”
A Dangerous Precedent
This ruling, and the reasoning behind it, could set a troubling national precedent. It effectively implies:
- Voters have no judicially enforceable right to verify that the vote recorded matches the vote cast.
- The mere act of voting satisfies constitutional requirements, even if the system used is non-transparent or demonstrably flawed.
- Even extensive technical demonstrations showing exploitable vulnerabilities and mismatched vote records (as seen in Cast Vote Record audits in multiple Georgia counties) do not warrant legal redress.
In the words of attorney Sidney Powell, reacting on X:
“The old ‘standing’ argument!”
It’s a now-familiar pattern in election-related litigation—substantive issues are avoided, not ruled upon, because plaintiffs are deemed to lack standing.
The Political Context: A System Under Strain
Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in a tone-deaf celebratory post on X, claimed victory:
“This ruling is just one more resounding vindication of Georgia’s elections… Real-world evidence shows that Georgia’s paper ballot voting system works.”
But critics argue Raffensperger ignored the real substance of the trial. The BMDs in question tabulate votes via QR code, which voters cannot verify, and audit trails depend on those same unreadable QR codes, not the human-readable text.
Even Senate Bill 189, passed after the trial, acknowledges some of these concerns by:
- Eliminating QR code tabulation by 2026
- Allowing hand-marked paper ballots in smaller jurisdictions
- Creating a pilot audit program to verify only human-readable ballot text
But those changes do not take effect before the 2024 presidential election, leaving Georgia voters stuck with a system many now view as unverifiable and vulnerable.
Expert Investigations and Unanswered Questions
Independent analysts like Phillip Davis, a software engineer, have already shown that Cast Vote Records (CVRs) in multiple Georgia counties do not match ballot images, suggesting possible systemic discrepancies. In an X thread, Davis highlighted counties where votes clearly marked for one candidate were tabulated for another.
That alone would seem to constitute “legally cognizable injury.” But under Judge Totenberg’s ruling, it does not.
The Cost of Litigation and the Cost to Confidence
This case took eight years, involved a 17-day trial, hundreds of hours of testimony, and millions of dollars in legal fees—only to be dismissed on jurisdictional grounds.
The message this sends to the American public is dire: you may cast a ballot, but you have no enforceable right to know whether your vote is counted as cast.
If courts will not even entertain claims when experts demonstrate live that votes can be flipped without detection, then the public’s faith in the electoral system risks eroding beyond repair.
As Marks concluded:
“A system where a voter has no way to know whether their ballot reflects their true selections is fundamentally incompatible with the constitutional right to vote.”
Final Thoughts
This case was never about partisanship—it was about transparency, verifiability, and trust in democratic processes. When courts turn away from these concerns, citing rigid interpretations of standing, the rule of law begins to appear complicit in shielding flawed systems from scrutiny.
What remains is an open question for voters, lawmakers, and future courts: If voters have no standing to protect the integrity of their vote, who does?
The implications will reverberate far beyond Georgia.