...and print out a receipt providing proof you voted for Cookie Monster at the same time. Standard homework for high schoolers already back in the 80s, the point being that it doesnt have to be a expert of any sort but rather just someone familiar with the language a given computer uses.
Why the debate over a computer scientist’s Dominion report is so heated; circa 2017
By Jessica Huseman | March 2, 2022, votebeat.org
Conspiracy theories collided in Georgia in late January, resulting in additional confusion in a long-standing lawsuit over the state’s use of Dominion voting machines. At the center of efforts by entities on both the left and right is a court-sealed report by University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman claiming that the Dominion voting system has a vulnerability that could be exploited — but hasn’t yet — to manipulate votes in a future election.
Fox News and One America News Network are now seeking a copy of the report, and this week the Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggested Georgia’s secretary of state had ignored the report, leaving gaping holes in the state’s election system. There’s much, much more to the story. The upshot is that this lawsuit continues to be used today by those perpetuating Trump’s Big Lie as evidence of their claims.
The lawsuit was initially filed in 2017 by the left-leaning Coalition for Good Governance and a group of individual voters, to force Georgia to use paper-backed voting machines. At the time, Georgia was using outdated DRE machines. Then the state, amid the litigation and after the legislature authorized and funded new machines in early 2019, replaced the DREs in 2020 with a paper-backed voting system built by Dominion. But the lawsuit, now known as Curling v. Raffensperger, didn’t stop. It instead shifted to alleging that the new system was so insecure as to be unconstitutional.
Over four years of litigation, the plaintiffs have not succeeded in their goal of moving Georgia’s elections almost exclusively to hand-marked paper ballots. While U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg has expressed public concern over the Dominion system, she has not been persuaded to make the state abandon it. So far, Totenberg has not forced the state to make any major changes to its voting system that it wasn’t already prepared to make, even as her August 2019 order required the secretary of state to replace the DREs by the state’s 2020 deadline.
Experts who have reviewed Halderman’s report, such as Juan Gilbert, the University of Florida’s computer science department chair, have not found it to be nearly as dire as Halderman has publicly suggested. As part of the suit, Judge Totenberg granted Halderman unfettered access to the Dominion voting system in order to inspect the security of the machines. Because of his access, Totenberg sealed the report, making it available to only the attorneys on the case and the expert witnesses. And even though the state on Jan. 27 asked Totenberg to unseal the document so as to clear public confusion, she seemed unready to do so.
“I’m unhappy about the course of political treatment of the report…. it’s out of hand,” Totenberg said in court. “But I’m not going to release it without seeing what is being proposed with redactions.”
Still, the general contents of the report aren’t exactly a secret. Halderman has long claimed that ballot-marking devices could be manipulated by malicious actors. Halderman made public a high-level summary of his findings in early August. Marilyn Marks, the executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance who is among the plaintiffs in the Curling case, then distributed this summary to every county in Georgia by email the day after Halderman filed his report. Votebeat was provided with a copy of the email. She called Halderman’s finding an “urgent concern,” alarming enough for counties “to reconsider their use of BMDs this fall, and instead use hand marked paper ballots with voluntary robust audits.” No county acted on her warning.
Despite Judge Totenberg sealing Halderman’s assessment, the publicity campaign some of the plaintiffs have mounted over the report — which none of them has seen in full — has resulted in two media dustups over its contents, to the obvious discontent of Totenberg. The first was in August, when Halderman first publicized what he claimed were massive security flaws in the system, and then in late January, when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the state had done nothing to unseal the report or to act on its findings. This is the exact kind of speculation Totenberg sought to prevent when she sealed the report. The AJC quoted multiple people without noting which of them did or didn’t have knowledge of the report’s full details but who nonetheless implored the state to act. That’s not the responsible way to present these issues.
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