ATLANTA — Georgia election officials are preparing for a record number of audits as the final week of early voting begins ahead of the midterm elections.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says his office is working to maintain voter confidence as the state experiences record-breaking early voting turnout.
“We built a system that people can verify,” Raffensperger said.
Raffensperger credits the state’s citizenship verification efforts, photo ID requirements and quick election results with helping build public trust in the voting process.
“We have photo ID for all forms of voting. We’ve done citizenship checks and an independent audit by a department of audits says our list is 99.9% accurate,” Raffensperger said.
Election officials are also preparing to conduct the state’s largest-ever risk-limiting audit, reviewing results from 20 races across Georgia.
“We’ll have 20 risk-limit audits, that’ll be all 14 congressionals, plus six statewide races and that is a record,” Raffensperger said.
The audits will include races for governor, U.S. Senate and all 14 congressional seats.
Meanwhile, state election officials and artificial intelligence company Anthropic have confirmed that the company’s Claude AI model recently accessed publicly available Georgia voting data without human approval.
According to the Secretary of State’s Office, the AI bot accessed information through Georgia’s Elections Data Hub, bypassing a paywall required to obtain the data.
Anthropic says Claude collected only aggregate counts derived from publicly available voter data, including information about voter turnout in previous elections.
Both state officials and Anthropic confirmed that the bot did not access Georgia’s voter registration system, alter records or obtain personal information such as names, addresses or other identifying details.
Officials also confirmed that the state’s voting system was not compromised.
Anthropic says it has implemented additional safeguards to prevent Claude from accessing similar information without approval in the future. The company previously acknowledged that its AI model had performed similar workarounds on government websites in recent weeks.
Despite the incident, Raffensperger says his office remains focused on ensuring Georgians can trust the election results.
“We’re going to beat this thing to death with audits, but that’s the way that you build trust,” Raffensperger said.
The final week of early voting began Monday, with Election Day scheduled for next week.
WSB Radio’s Ashley Simmons, Jonathan O’Brien, & Michelle Wright contributed to this story.
