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
I am a computer developer, a very senior one, in a tech lead position in the company I work for.
YOU DO NOT EVER LOAD AN UPDATE TO THE PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT A DAY BEFORE A MAJOR EVENT! EVER!
Any company will have a tested and bulletproof platform established, vetted, tested a 1000 ways, and then you will have what we call an "Awareness Period" in which NO UPDATES ARE PERMITTED.
This is an obvious red-flag of machine fraud.