Georgia election officials have said that they will not update the software on the state’s Dominion voting machines until after the 2024 election, Just the News reported.
A 2021 report that was released by a federal judge in Atlanta concluded that there are significant vulnerabilities in Dominion’s voting machines.
The report from J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor, and Auburn University professor Drew Springall outlines the vulnerabilities found in Dominion’s ImageCast X Ballot Marking Devices.
The report, provided to the plaintiffs in Curling v. Raffensperger, concluded that Dominion voting machines are vulnerable to vote flipping and can be manipulated by bad actors.
According to Professor Halderman’s report, malware could be installed on individual voting machines and the QR codes that appear on the printed ballots could be altered. Additionally, bad actors could attack the broader voting system if they can obtain the same access given to some county election officials.
At the same time, the report said that there was no evidence that any of the vulnerabilities were exploited in previous elections.
After Halderman’s report was concluded, Dominion commissioned MITRE Corp’s National Election Security Lab to review the findings.
MITRE’s July 2022 report said Halderman’s findings were “operationally infeasible” given normal voting practices, strict adherence to security measures, and scale considerations.
After the MITRE report was released, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the report confirmed that the state’s “election infrastructure is secured by the toughest safeguards.”
Raffensperger said at the time that contrary to the “ever-shifting claims” about voter fraud, the MITRE report makes it clear that “voting machines do not flip votes.” He maintained that the ballots cast “are counted as the voter intended” and the state’s “elections are secure.”
The Secretary of State’s chief operating officer Gabriel Sterling told NBC News earlier this month that the state would wait until 2025 to update its voting machines, explaining that it was “the safest, wisest course” logistically, legally, and from a risk-management perspective.
