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11 Jan: NBC: ‘Online and vulnerable’: Experts find nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems connected to internet
A team of election security experts used a “Google for servers” to challenge claims that voting machines do not connect to the internet and found some did.
By Kevin Monahan, Cynthia McFadden and Didi Martinez
It was an assurance designed to bolster public confidence in the way America votes: Voting machines “are not connected to the internet.”
Then Acting Undersecretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security Jeanette Manfra said those words in 2017, testifying before Congress while she was responsible for the security of the nation’s voting system.
So many government officials like Manfra have said the same thing over the last few years that it is commonly accepted as gospel by most Americans.

While the voting machines themselves are not designed to be online, the larger voting systems in many states end up there, putting the voting process at risk...
“We found over 35 [voting systems] had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,” Kevin Skoglund, a senior technical advisor at the election security advocacy group National Election Defense Coalition, told NBC News...

***The three largest voting manufacturing companies — Election Systems &Software, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic — have acknowledged they all put modems in some of their tabulators and scanners. The reason? So that unofficial election results can more quickly be relayed to the public. Those modems connect to cell phone networks, which, in turn, are connected to the internet...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/online-vulnerable-experts-find-nearly-three-dozen-u-s-voting-n1112436

4 Nov: Politico: Georgia election official: Machine glitch caused by last-minute ***vendor upload
by Kim Zetter; Eric Geller contributed to this report.
A technology glitch that halted voting in two Georgia counties on Tuesday morning was caused by a ***vendor uploading an update to their election machines the night before, a county election supervisor said.

Voters were unable to cast machine ballots for a couple of hours in Morgan and Spalding counties after the electronic devices crashed, state officials said. In response to the delays, Superior Court Judge W. Fletcher Sams extended voting until 11 p.m.
The counties use voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems and electronic poll books — used to sign in voters — made by KnowInk.

The companies “uploaded something last night, which is not normal, and it caused a glitch,” said Marcia Ridley, elections supervisor at Spalding County Board of Election. That glitch prevented pollworkers from using the pollbooks to program smart cards that the voters insert into the voting machines.

Ridley said that a representative from the two companies called her after poll workers began having problems with the equipment Tuesday morning and said the problem was due to an upload to the machines by one of their technicians overnight.
***“That is something that they don’t ever do. I’ve never seen them update anything the day before the election,” Ridley said. Ridley said ***she did not know what the upload contained.

***Gabriel Sterling, voting system implementation manager in the secretary of state’s office, told reporters that the issue likely was a dataset that got uploaded to the systems, but that they don’t know for certain. He did not say if the dataset was uploaded by the voting machine vendor.
Sterling told reporters the issue took some time to fix because technicians had to bring in additional equipment to correct the problem.

***Neither Dominion nor KnowInk responded to a request to comment. A spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office also did not respond to follow-up questions about who uploaded the dataset and whether it had been reviewed and tested by anyone beforehand...
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/georgia-election-machine-glitch-434065