The Georgia Republican Party (GAGOP) released a statement renewing its call to “support voter confidence for all Georgians in our elections” following an expert report evaluating the security of Georgia’s voting equipment.
“Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are rightly dismayed that no attempt is being made to address the vulnerabilities identified by the report before the 2024 Presidential Election,” GAGOP Chairman Josh McKoon said in a statement. “Given the breach of confidence in recent election cycles, plagued with irregularities, now more than ever Georgians deserve to know their votes are secure.”
“The accuracy and fairness of our electoral process should be the foremost priority for our Election Officials,” McKoon (pictured above) added.
The report, made public last week, was ordered to assist in the lawsuit, Curling v. Raffensperger, to help the court “understand” the “risks” posed by the voting machines.
The report was authored by University of Michigan computer science professor Alex Halderman describing his findings after conducting a security analysis of the ballot scanners and ballot marking devices (BMDs) manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems.
According to Halderman, he “played the role of an attacker and attempted to discover ways to compromise the system and change votes.”
“I, along with my assistant, spent a total of approximately twelve person-weeks studying the machines, testing for vulnerabilities, and developing proof-of-concept attacks. Many of the attacks I successfully implemented could be effectuated by malicious actors with very limited time and access to the machines, as little as mere minutes,” Halderman explained.
In the 96-page report, Halderman explained how the machines suffer from “critical vulnerabilities that can be exploited to subvert all of its security mechanisms, including: user authentication, data integrity protection, access control, privilege separation, audit logs, protective counters, hash validation, and external firmware validation.”
In regards to making the current voting systems “more secure,” Halderman suggested “changes” to the machine’s software; however, he noted that “merely patching these specific problems is unlikely to make the [voting systems] substantially more secure.”
Halderman added that his study may have only discovered partial insecurities in the voting systems, saying, “It is very likely that there are other, equally critical flaws in the [voting systems] that are yet to be discovered.”
Halderman’s report is a strong resource for the plaintiffs in Curling v. Raffensperger, which argue that the voting machines are “so insecure” that they “violate voters’ constitutional rights.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Georgia Star News and The Star News Network.
Photo “Josh McKoon” by Josh McKoon. Background Photo “Ballot Machine” by Lance Fisher CC BY-SA 2.0.
