Technology experts are warning that the state of Georgia’s election results will continue to be viewed with suspicion if Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refuses to address the grave concerns published in the recently released Halderman report.
“Raffensperger has lumped us with the election deniers,” David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and an expert on election technology told POLITICO. “But we cannot, out of fear of that confusion, stop talking about these vulnerabilities. They are real, they are there, and they must be addressed.”
The Halderman report uncovered nine “critical vulnerabilities” in Dominion Voting Systems’ machines and found that a “dishonest election worker…with just brief access to the scanner’s memory card could violate ballot secrecy and determine how individual voters voted.”
But Raffensperger, who is ultimately in charge of election oversight, doesn’t seem concerned, issuing a statement last week claiming, “It’s more likely that I could win the lottery without buying a ticket,” than someone being able to tamper with his Dominion machines undetected. His spokesman, Mike Hassinger, went even further: “If the PhDs don’t like being put in the same category as the Pillow salesman, tough noogies. They should stop saying similar things.”
Prof. Alex Halderman himself expressed his disappointment in Raffensperger’s response, calling it “the height of irresponsibility.” Georgia is the only state in the country that mandates the use of Dominion’s ICX system since 2019, instead of simply having it on hand amongst other methods of voting. Texas refused to use it at all, after it failed security tests.
John Poulos, the CEO of Dominion, recently predicted the company’s collapse because so many states have lost confidence in Dominion machines since the 2020 presidential election. Governor Ron DeSantis hosted a fundraiser at Dominion’s lawyers’ offices on Friday evening in Washington, D.C.
