Georgia’s electronic voting system has been charged with having cybersecurity flaws. Georgia officials recertified election results on Monday, December 7, 2022 after a recount reaffirmed an accurate count of the state's ballots. Georgia has counted ballots three times, and results remain unchanged. Tabulators accurately counted votes in 2020, which has been verified by two audits, both on security and counting methods, as well as a recount, and affirmed by Georgia's Voting System Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling, Republican Governor Brian Kemp, and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger..
Whether those votes were accurately counted is set to be decided at trial in early 2024.
Dominion Electronic Voting Machine
Source: Associated Press
U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg issued a 135-page ruling late Friday, November 10, 2023 in response to a long-running lawsuit filed by activists who want the state to stop using electronic voting machines and return to hand-marked paper ballots. The state asked the judge to rule in its favor based on the arguments and facts in the case. Totenberg found there are “material facts in dispute” that must be decided at trial.
She set a Jan. 9, 2024 bench trial, no jury.
The lawsuit claims that the current configuration of the state’s election system presents a threat to voters’ right to have their votes counted as cast. It spawned an expert report that identified vulnerabilities in the election system used in Georgia that led a federal cybersecurity agency to issue an advisory to jurisdictions that use the equipment and has prompted some Georgia Republicans to call for abandoning the machines. It also led to the exposure of a breach of election equipment in a rural south Georgia county, which has resulted in criminal charges for several people as part of the sprawling Fulton County indictment against former President Donald Trump and 18 others.
The electronic voting system the state uses, which was purchased from Dominion Voting Systems in 2019 and implemented statewide in 2020.
Totenberg made clear in a footnote in her order that the evidence in the Georgia case “does not suggest that the Plaintiffs are conspiracy theorists of any variety. Indeed, some of the nation’s leading cybersecurity experts and computer scientists have provided testimony and affidavits on behalf of Plaintiffs’ case in the long course of this litigation.”
It targeted the paperless touchscreen voting machines. The touchscreen voting machines used by virtually every in-person voter in Georgia print a paper ballot with a human-readable summary and a QR code, a type of barcode, that is read by a scanner to count the votes.
Even if she ultimately rules in their favor, she wrote, she can’t order the state to implement a paper ballot system. She said there are “pragmatic, sound remedial policy measures” that she could order or that the parties could agree upon, including: eliminating QR codes on ballots and having scanners read human-legible text.
This is a daily news summary representing conversations about some aspect of voting technology innovation or implementation. Susan Eustis learned about voting when she was 5 years old. Her father was head of manufacturing for AVM. Susan Huhn Eustis used to take the high-paid AVM consultants horseback riding at age 9. She would tell them their new voting machine designs were wrong. In her 20's she invented the first electronic voting machine.
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Note on Methodology: Most of the material presented comes from 20 sources or more and there is an attempt by the author to find common ground between the different sources.
This post is in response to a story on the judicial action by the Associated Press on November 12, 2023.