by Mark Schwendau

This week an Atlanta federal court unsealed two reports on Georgia’s elections machines. The one report shows vulnerabilities, while the other disputes those claims. The Halderman report basically said vulnerabilities were significant, while the MITRE report refutes that report holding he got it all wrong.

The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office Gabe Sterling is the chief operating officer in the Secretary of State’s Office. Few people know Georgia elections better than he does. That office has been in litigation for six years in a voting machine lawsuit. Wednesday, the judge, in that case, ordered the release of two investigative reports attached to it.

For years former President Donald Trump has used words like “rigged” and “stolen” to describe his loss to Democrat Joe Biden, who never campaigned and proclaimed the Democrats had rigged the election the month before the election. These two reports will likely continue the debate over whether Georgia should replace its $138 million voting system.

The reports were released as part of ongoing litigation that seeks to force Georgia to drop its Dominion Voting Systems hardware and software in favor of hand-marked paper ballots. Far-left Judge Amy Totenberg sealed and concealed the results of the investigation of Dominion voting machines in Georgia and sat on the report until this week.

One report was written by Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg gave access to Georgia voting equipment and passwords to Halderman. His 2021 analysis said the voting system “suffers from critical vulnerabilities that can be exploited to subvert all of its security mechanisms.”

Halderman’s report said votes could be altered by someone with physical access to a voting touchscreen in a polling place. The report suggested a hacker could target only one voting machine at a time, limiting the number of ballots that could be changed. But an attack by someone who gained access to the election management system computers would have a much broader impact.

RINO Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a defendant in the lawsuit, of course, rejected the report’s conclusions. He’s said Halderman was only able to find vulnerabilities because he had unique access to the voting system. He argues security procedures would thwart an attack from an outsider in the real world.

The second report was generated by Dominion Voting Systems as they hired MITRE National Election Security Lab. The company analyzes election equipment and evaluates the risk of vulnerabilities relative to the Halderman report.

Judge Totenberg had sealed both reports out of concern they could be used to hack Georgia’s system during a future election. The Halderman report had redactions to prohibit the release of sensitive information. Some say the reports provide previously undisclosed details of the vulnerabilities Halderman found. But others who attended and reported on Mike Lindell’s 2021 Cyber Symposium already knew how the computerized voting machines could be hacked as some of the nation’s top cyber security experts did so with a variety of handheld remote electronic devices including laptop computers, pads, and cell phones.

Halderman concluded a software update Georgia installed in 2020 left ballot marking devices, or BMDs, “in a state where anyone can install malware with only brief physical access to the machines.” He also determined altering a specific electronic file installed during the 2020 election preparation could allow a hacker to spread malware to all ballot marking devices across a county or even the entire state.

Meanwhile, the MITRE report assessed the difficulty and technical skills needed to successfully achieve the kinds of attacks Halderman outlined. It also assessed the time required, whether such attacks could be detected, and the ability of such attacks to affect enough ballots to tip the outcome of an election. The MITRE report concluded the attacks Halderman envisioned are “operationally infeasible”. Even if successful, most attacks would affect “a statistically insignificant number of votes on a single (voting) device at a time,” they concluded.

The Coalition for Good Governance, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, disputed the MITRE report. They claim the report was premised on the false claim that existing security measures are sufficient. In a press release, this group cited a 2021 election data breach in Coffee County that was exposed. The coalition noted that Secretary of State Raffensperger’s office won’t update Georgia’s Dominion software as recommended until after the 2024 election.

Critics blast his plan to delay software updates on its voting machines until after the 2024 election and believe another election fix is going to be in.

Copyright © 2023 by Mark S. Schwendau

Mark S. Schwendau is a retired technology professor who has always had a sideline in news-editorial writing where his byline has been, “Bringing little known news to people who simply want to know the truth.”  He is a Christian conservative who God cast to be a realist.  His website is www.IDrawIWrite.Tech.