Johnny Kauffman

It is likely to be a banner year for the voting equipment industry with state and local election offices planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on new machines ahead of the 2020 election.

This year's purchases will probably amount to the biggest buying wave since right after the 2000 presidential election, when officials rushed to replace discredited punch card machines with touchscreen voting equipment. Those machines are rapidly aging and are being replaced with machines that leave a paper backup as a result of security concerns about purely electronic voting.

Updated at 5:40 p.m. ET

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has quietly signed a sweeping overhaul of the way elections are administered in the state. It includes several provisions, backed by Democrats, to address concerns about how nonwhite voters are treated that were raised during Kemp's election last year.

Emmet Jopling Bondurant II knew about the civil rights movement when he was a student at the University of Georgia in the 1950s, but he didn't join it.

"I was trying to get through college," the burly, white-haired 82-year-old said in an interview. "And I'm embarrassed to say I was not involved. I should have been involved much sooner."

But, as a 26-year-old lawyer, he soon took part in one of the most important voting rights cases before the Supreme Court in the 1960s — one that ultimately required states to put equal numbers of people in congressional districts.

When Democrat Stacey Abrams ended her bid last week to become governor of Georgia and the first black woman ever elected governor of any state, she issued a stinging indictment of Georgia's voting system, a system overseen by her Republican opponent Brian Kemp, who was the state's top election official during the 2018 midterms.

"Democracy failed Georgia," said Abrams in a speech acknowledging Kemp would be the state's next governor.

Georgia will continue using its touchscreen voting machines ahead of the midterms despite security concerns about the technology, a U.S. District Court judge ordered late Monday.

But Judge Amy Totenberg rebuked Georgia and state election officials over their handling of election security.

Georgia is one of 14 states using machines that lack a paper trail that voters can verify for themselves.

The security of Georgia's touchscreen electronic voting machines will be under scrutiny in a federal courtroom Wednesday.

A group of voters and election security advocates want a federal district court judge to order the state to not use the machines in this November's election and replace them with paper ballots.

"I will not cast my vote on those machines, as I have no confidence that those machines will accurately record, transmit, and county my vote," said one of the plaintiffs, Donna Curling, in a court filing.

In under a minute on Friday morning, a rural county in south Georgia voted to keep all of its polling places open. The Randolph County board of elections was under intense national scrutiny and the threat of lawsuits from civil rights groups if it decided to close the majority of its polls ahead of the November midterm elections.

At the meeting, a crowd of about 100 people celebrated as the decision came down.

Voting in the November midterms could get harder in one majority-black Georgia county with a poverty rate nearly double the national average.

Randolph County, population 7,224, is about three hours south of Atlanta. The rural, agricultural area is considered part of the south's "Black Belt." It's known for producing peanuts and cotton, as well as a history of slavery, racial violence and voter suppression.

In the fall of 2016, as reports of Russian-backed hacking of state election systems were surfacing, Georgia's Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, rejected federal offers of help to secure his state's voting systems.

"The question remains whether the federal government will subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security," Kemp told a technology website.

The ugly and close race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Georgia has become even more heated. Last Wednesday, with less than a week before the primary runoff election, President Trump unexpectedly endorsed Brian Kemp, Georgia's secretary of state.

"Brian is tough on crime, strong on the border and illegal immigration," Trump tweeted. "He loves our Military and our Vets and protects our Second Amendment. I give him my full and total endorsement."