A federal judge will decide on Thursday if Georgia’s highly disputed Dominion voting machines are in violation of voters’ constitutional rights and are vulnerable to hacking, ahead of the swing state’s March 12 presidential primary.

The heavily debated case has been in court for six years as state officials hashed out whether the machines were secure. In 2022, Alex Halderman, a computer science professor from the University of Michigan, conducted an audit that found nine vulnerabilities in the system’s software, sparking concern for experts and state secretaries in other states using voting machines.

U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg blocked the state from using its previous outdated voting machines in 2019. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger authorized the new Dominion voting systems with a $107 million contract. The software allows voters to make their choice using the machine through ballot-marking capabilities that produce a receipt recording their vote and a QR code that can be scanned to count a person’s vote, NBC News reported.  

“The Court cannot order the Georgia legislature to pass legislation creating a paper ballot voting system or judicially impose a statewide paper ballot system as injunctive relief in this case,” Totenberg wrote in a November ruling.

On Wednesday, the chief operating officer of the Georgia secretary of state’s office, Gabriel Sterling, defended the state’s paperless election process, saying that changing the state’s voting system during an election year is “nightmarish.” 

“You are going to disenfranchise — especially in Fulton County — thousands of people, and I don’t think anybody wants that,” Sterling testified on Wednesday. 

Following Raffensperger’s decision not to update the state’s nearly 24,000 voting machines in 2022, calling them secure, some state officials and election integrity advocates were concerned it could compromise election integrity. 

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“It’s somewhat provocative and antagonistic to people who believe that secure elections are important to say that we’re going to go through the 2024 presidential election, in which Georgia has been named the No. 1 battleground in the country and has the most voting machines, that we will not be updating them,” former Republican Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler told the Washington Examiner in October.

Totenberg’s ruling could have a significant impact on the hotly contested presidential election in November as the battleground state awaits her decision on the use of the machines.