Posted on 09/10/2022 9:59:56 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
An independent panel of experts on computer systems and election security issues has concluded a lengthy investigation into the voting systems currently in place in the state of Georgia and sent recommendations to the State Election Board and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The current system primarily relies on touchscreen voting machines produced by Dominion Voting Systems. The audit must not have gone very well because they advise that the state discontinue the use of the Dominion machines and move immediately to hand-marked paper ballots. They are also recommending a much broader series of mandatory audits of the results after the initial count is concluded. These changes, they say, will not only afford greater accuracy but increased public confidence in the outcome. But at least initially, it doesn’t sound as if Raffensperger and the rest of the board are warming up to the idea. (Associated Press)
A group of computer and election security experts is urging Georgia election officials to replace the state’s touchscreen voting machines with hand-marked paper ballots ahead of the November midterm elections, citing what they say are “serious threats” posed by an apparent breach of voting equipment in one county.
The 13 experts on Thursday sent a letter to the members of the State Election Board and to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who’s a non-voting member of the board. It urges them to immediately stop using the state’s Dominion Voting Systems touchscreen voting machines. It also suggests they mandate a particular type of post-election audit on the outcome of all races on the ballot.
The experts who sent the letter include academics and former state election officials and are not associated with efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
You might be wondering if such a change is even possible with less than two months to go until election day and only a month before some early mail ballots begin going out. But the authors of the study point out that no real changes would need to be made other than giving the order because the state already has a law in place allowing paper ballots to be used on an emergency basis. The state could simply eliminate the machines and employ the paper ballot system exclusively.
Raffensperger’s spokesman didn’t seem enthusiastic. He said that they would respond to the letter “in due time and with due care,” but that the response would be sent directly to the authors and not be “leaked to the media to obtain some sort of rhetorical advantage.”
This is a sticky situation, particularly considering the ongoing investigation into a “breach” of the voting equipment in one county by people associated with Donald Trump. Also, the efforts to overturn the results in Georgia and claims about potential voter fraud and issues with the Dominion system may play into the board’s decision. And how much “due time” does Raffensperger think he has, given the short amount of time remaining before voting begins?
Unless Georgia wants to see a repeat of 2020, I believe they would be wise to take the panel’s advice and go to paper ballots. Any sort of touchscreen system that doesn’t involve a paper ballot filled out by the voter is bound to be suspect at this point, particularly when most voters are likely aware of how often government computer systems are hacked all around the globe. The current Dominion system takes the voter’s input from the touchscreen and prints out a ballot, but it uses a QR code that is unreadable by the voter to register the tally.
The other reality to deal with here is that paper ballots work and you can find few better examples of that truth than the system in France. The French use paper ballots that are filled out by hand in all but a handful of precincts that have experimented with voting machines. There is no absentee or mail-in voting. After showing identification and filling out their ballots, French voters place them in a sealed envelope and deposit them in a transparent box. They then must sign the voter roll to prevent people from voting twice. In April, they went through that process in the first presidential election and they had the results ready to release on the night of the election. No questions were raised about the accuracy of the results and the losers conceded immediately.
Georgia could do the very same thing with very little muss or fuss if the board acts promptly. At this point, it doesn’t really matter if the Dominion machines are 100% accurate and immune from tampering (doubtful) or if they are rife with errors and potential exposures to hacking. People have seen too many stories surrounding Dominion at this point. These elections coming up in November are expected to be extremely close in many cases. Do you think everyone is simply going to be satisfied with computer-generated results and just go home and forget about it? Hand-marked paper ballots can be produced and counted as many times as they need to be. Georgia’s elections, no matter how close they may be, could stand up to any level of scrutiny if they do this. And they should, as quickly as possible.
Raffensberger couldn’t handle the loss of income.
China won’t approve.
This news will of course be suppressed by the legacy media.
Cynics....
Thank you for noticing.
Dominion is a company based in Canada and we don’t even use their machines for federal elections... Minor city council elections and a couple of provincial bodies use them.
We arrive at a polling station... Produce our photo identification, mark an X on a paper ballot, place it in a cardboard box and all political parties have representatives present. The votes are then counted with all representative present. It’s all pretty simple and easy to do. We only have 38 million people, but I’m pretty sure you can still translate this system to a much larger population.
The good news... All the votes get counted. The bad news.. We’re still governed by a dweeb who’s party the Liberals only got 32% of the votes. The Conservatives actual got 33%, but because of our riding based system the Liberals got more seats in parliament.
The change we can use... Run off elections. Hopefully that change will come some day.
BTW... Another suggestion to make your federal elections cleaner... Have the voting for President on a Monday... The voting for all other measures and offices on Tuesday. This would eliminate ballot measures that get out one parties voters over another’s for specific wedge issues.
“The current system primarily relies on touchscreen voting machines produced by Dominion Voting Systems. The audit must not have gone very well because they advise that the state discontinue the use of the Dominion machines and move immediately to hand-marked paper ballots.”
We need a Federal Judge to declare that Dominion must be outlawed from any state’s election process. Period.
But Soros and the Democrats like them so much. Don’t be mean.
They’re like rigged Las Vegas slot machines. Dems win. Dems win. Dems win.
Dominion sues everybody that doesn’t talk nice about them.
The Coffee County “breach” they refer to is a hyped up pile of nothing. It was people trying to do forensics on the Dominion machines two months after the elections. Calling it a “breach” is the Dems trying to gin up an election issue ~20 months after the event. People looked at the machines and the data they housed and produced.
Are they saying Dominion machines hooked up to the internet may be inaccurate? No way.
In a federal lawsuit in 2019, an expert witness disclosed in court that the GA voting machines were running Windows CE 3.0 and 4.0 from circa 2005.
You old-timer IT guys might remember Windows CE (”Consumer Edition”). It was a lightweight edition of Microsoft Windows for the handheld Pocket PC (remember that?)
Windows CE had zero security. Everything ran as root. The kernel was wide open and trivially hackable.
more likely the panel of experts will be investigated for trying to interfere in the elections
It’s my understanding that the average voting precinct has less that 3,000 people. How hard can counting paper ballots be?
The panel can recommend anything it wants. TPTB will ignore it. Their payoffs are too lucrative and they want that Chinese money for their retirement years.
I will be utterly shocked if they do away with those ridiculous machines.
My prediction - they won’t change a thing, and will rationalize this as it would “embolden conspiracy theories around 2020”. They might even acknowledge the experts are right but since the “optics” are bad the bureaucrat mind will decide it’s better to risk fraud v provide talking points to Trump supporters.
Raffensperger and Kemp took Chinese money to install the machines. They then helped cover up the massive 2020 voter fraud. They are not going to get rid of the machines.
Fortunately IMO events are going to unroll going forward which will likely stop or postpone the midterm election. If not I fully expect a repeat of 2020.
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