Georgia official’s dismissal of security audit could mean trouble in 2024
For the second time in four years, Georgia’s secretary of state stands at the center of a fight over the legitimacy of a U.S. presidential election. Only now, Brad Raffensperger — the Republican who once stood up to Donald Trump’s election fraud lies — is the one security experts see as the problem.
In a letter sent to state lawmakers last week, Raffensperger argues that a newly unsealed audit finding that there are dangerous vulnerabilities in Georgia’s widely used voting machine software is overblown and no fixes are needed.
“It’s more likely that I could win the lottery without buying a ticket” than that hackers flip enough votes to swing the election, he says in the letter.
But Raffensperger’s dismissive reaction to the unsparing audit conducted by security expert Alex Halderman has turned him into an object of intense criticism from cybersecurity specialists, who say he is painting legitimate research with the brush of far-right conspiracy theories — and imperiling the 2024 elections in the process.
“Raffensperger has lumped us with the election deniers,” said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and an expert on election technology. “But we cannot, out of fear of that confusion, stop talking about these vulnerabilities. They are real, they are there, and they must be addressed.”
Before its release last week, the analysis of Dominion Voting Systems’ ImageCastX ballot-marking devices was kept under seal for roughly two years as part of a long-running legal dispute between Raffensperger and local voting rights activists arguing the machines need to be replaced by hand-marked paper ballots.
Georgia is one of just two states in the country to use these ballot-marking devices as the primary form of voting across every precinct, and the plaintiffs — a Georgia-based non-profit group called the Coalition for Good Governance — have alleged its dependence on them is unacceptably risky because of the way the ImageCastX records voter’s choices: via machine-printed barcodes voters can’t corroborate with their own eyes.
The state has maintained throughout the court challenge that it has adequate…
