THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

That is the excuse given by Georgia officials as Secretary of State Brian Kemp, in charge of state elections, tries to elect Brian Kemp governor in November.

County election officials across Georgia say it’s too late to switch to paper ballots in the upcoming elections, despite warnings that hackers could easily penetrate the state’s antiquated electronic voting system and that Russia could unleash a new wave of disruptive cyberattacks.

U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg is expected to rule any day on whether the state must switch to old-fashioned paper ballots. Her ruling would come in response to a year-old lawsuit by citizen activists. They argue that the state’s current system of relying on electronic voting machines that lack a paper backup is “hopelessly compromised” and paper ballots are necessary to ensure public confidence in the results.

Georgia is just one of many states dealing with the fallout of the U.S. intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 campaign and has compromised — or tried to compromise — state election systems across the country to disrupt the 2018 midterms elections.

But interviews and court statements from Republican and Democratic county officials and from state election officials drew the same response: It’s just too late to make the switch.

Lawyers for Secretary of State Brian Kemp say things will get chaotic if Totenberg orders a statewide shift to paper. Kemp is the Republican nominee for governor.

“It’s impossible,” said Rinda Wilson, the Republican chairman of the Macon-Bibb County Board of Elections. Anyone who says otherwise, she said, “doesn’t have the faintest idea how the whole system works. You have deadlines, you have early voting ... It would throw the entire election into chaos.”

Such a shift at this stage would cause “significant administrative and financial burden” on Muscogee County, which borders Alabama in central Georgia, said Nancy Boren, its election director.

The county would want more time to train poll workers and educate the public and currently lacks enough scanners to handle all ballots, Boren said.

Last week, Democrats on the elections board in Morgan County, a Republican bastion in central Georgia, sought to capitalize on a vacant seat that briefly gave them the majority. But even as they proposed to dump the electronic voting machines and push the county toward paper ballots that would be read by optical scanners, Republicans filled the vacancy and defeated the motion.

In court statements filed in the suit against Kemp and other state officials, elections directors from several counties said switching to hand-marked paper ballots so late could be prohibitively costly or complex.

Activists’ push for paper has been propelled by security concerns stemming both from a breach in Georgia’s elections system and worries that Russia’ will repeat cyberattacks that interfered with the 2016 elections.

And why shouldn't they have to work overtime to fix the problem since they waited 6this long to fix it? An honest and fair election is worth whatever cost and effort it takes.