Despite all the claims to the contrary, recent reports indicate that Dominion Voting Systems voting machines have vulnerabilities. A two-year-old cybersecurity report only saw the light of day this week, well after Fox News settled with Dominion for $787.5 million. The timing of the release raises all sorts of questions about how this information could have saved Fox News a boatload of dough and potentially kept Tucker Carlson at his job.
But there’s an even bigger question about what this means for the future. According to a report from Just The News, “Georgia is delaying a software update for its Dominion voting machines until after the 2024 presidential election, despite cybersecurity experts warning of vulnerabilities.”
In July 2021, University of Michigan Professor J. Alex Halderman and Professor Drew Springall of Auburn University completed their report on vulnerabilities found in Dominion’s ImageCast X Ballot Marking Devices, which was compiled after a three-month examination, and revealed that the Dominion machines are indeed susceptible to vote flipping. It wasn’t until last week that a redacted version of the report was released by the Atlanta Division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
Related: Now They Tell Us: New Report Reveals ‘Critical Vulnerabilities’ in Dominion Voting Machines
Though Halderman insists there is no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in previous elections, he indicated that the machines could be manipulated by malicious actors within minutes, making Georgia’s elections vulnerable to hacking.
“My technical findings leave Georgia voters with greatly diminished grounds to be confident that the votes they cast on [the current Dominion ballot-marking devices] are secured, that their votes will be counted correctly, or that any future elections using Georgia’s [ballot-marking devices] will be reasonably secure from attack and produce correct results,” he wrote.
If that’s not a warning to fix the problem ASAP, I don’t know what is. Yet not only are Georgia election officials not rushing to fix the vulnerability, they claim that the reason they aren’t updating the machines until after the 2024 election is that it’s too large of a job to complete in time. This, even though the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) urged election officials to fix the vulnerability a year ago. They refused because a Dominion-commissioned report claimed it was “operationally infeasible” to do so.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger took the Dominion-commissioned report at face value, and argued it confirmed that “Georgia’s election infrastructure is secured by the toughest safeguards.”
“For years, election deniers have created a cottage industry of ever-shifting claims about conspiracies to change votes, steal elections and undermine voter confidence,” Raffensperger said. “This report says it all: Voting machines do not flip votes. Cast ballots are counted as the voter intended. Georgia elections are secure.”
According to Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, Georgia won’t update its machines until 2025, which he claims is “legally, logistically and just risk-management wise, this was the safest wisest course.”
No matter what your stance on the 2020 elections may be, the unsettling truth is that Georgia officials have displayed an alarming disregard for the security of their own voting machines. It is evident that they have turned a blind eye to the mounting concerns surrounding the reliability of these machines in recent years. Such blatant negligence is a direct affront to those who have tirelessly fought to uphold the integrity of our elections since 2020.
