Earlier this month, the Georgia Home Appropriations Committee convened to overview budgets for the Fiscal 12 months 2025. Throughout the hearing, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger started his plea for hundreds of thousands of {dollars} extra for the voting machines and election methods that Georgia tax-payers simply bought for $107 million in 2019.
Raffensperger started his plea for the Elections Division funding by claiming, “Since day 1, election security has been my top priority and will continue to be so,” after which he referred to Georgia’s system as “battle-tested.” He then asserts that Georgia is a “national leader in elections” as a result of they had been the primary state to have applied “the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 17 days of early voting, which have been called the ‘Gold Standard’, and ‘no excuse’ absentee voting.”
None of these objects he listed must be thought-about helpful to “election security.”
Raffensperger went on to request $32.3 million for FY25, with almost two-thirds of the request “designed to address election security issues” for a complete of $20.2 million. He additionally requested $6 million to switch the “aging voting machine power supplies” on the lower than five-year-old methods (which was additionally requested final 12 months) in addition to $4,125,000 for QR Code Readers. Georgia’s BMDs at present print the voter’s intent in a non-human-verifiable QR Code on the bodily paper poll.
When the funding request was damaged down additional, it amounted to the next:
- Elections Software program Reinstall – $10,432,696
- Safety and Voter Upgrades – $11,839,160
- Investigations – $487,160
- Firms – $3,275,000
- Elections Personnel Wants – $2,686,000
- Voter Contact/Checklist Upkeep – $3,195,000
- Skilled Licensing Boards – $397,200
Raffensperger specifies that the “Software Reinstall” applies to all 159 counties and entails 34,000 poll marking gadgets (BMDs) and nearly 3,800 poll scanners.
Throughout questioning, Senator Max Burns introduced up the latest roll-out of Garvis Ballot Pads and a dialogue at a November committee assembly relating to the ballot pads, which Raffensperger was not in attendance. Sen. Burns talked about that they’d requested the quantity spent on the Garvis Ballot Pads and the place that cash was allotted from. Raffensperger didn’t know the whole at the moment however talked about the funding was from “bond funds redirected.”
Raffensperger deployed Garvis Ballot Pads in municipal elections to help with voter test in. The ballot pads are linked to the web and dependable sources say they’re simply hackable.
The Georgia Legislature didn’t approve the hundreds of thousands to pay for… pic.twitter.com/vzo20iz1Om
— Debbie Dooley (@Crimsontider) December 28, 2023
When requested by Senator Burns in regards to the effectiveness of the ballot pads, Raffensperger responded that “overall, it went very well” with “a few localized issues.” He supplied no substantive description of or decision to any of these points, however as a substitute cited a “checklist” that they’re engaged on.
Subsequent, Senator Brandon Seaside requested in regards to the “nine vulnerabilities” within the Halderman Report and Raffensperger’s declare that it will price $32.5 million to “fix” these vulnerabilities. Sen. Seaside requested if the newly-presented $10 million would adequately repair the machines. Raffensperger claimed the brand new request was “whittled down” and could also be “sharpened” even additional.
Raffensperger then doubled down that the implementation of those “fixes” gained’t be capable to be carried out till after the 2024 election, even when more cash was allotted, as Sen. Seaside steered. The SOS claimed that it will take 97,000 man-hours to replace the previously-mentioned 34,000 BMDs, or roughly 2.9 hours per BMD.
In J Alex Halderman’s 2021 report that was lately unsealed by Decide Amy Totenberg within the Curling v. Raffensperger case, Halderman claims:
…in reviewing the processes it would require an replace of the almost 45,000 items of voting gear, together with the next acceptance testing. This course of will take tens of 1000’s of manhours. Due to this fact, the statewide transfer to five.17 will happen following the 2024 election cycle. It will permit the state and counties to give attention to executing municipal elections and operating the Presidential cycle. It additionally permits the state to place collectively a considerate, thorough plan to roll out the most recent software program.
Particularly relating to the “patch” of the BMDs, he states:
A few of the essential vulnerabilities I found might be a minimum of partially mitigated by means of modifications to the ICX’s software program, and I encourage Dominion and the State of Georgia to maneuver as shortly as attainable to treatment them. Nevertheless, merely patching these particular issues is unlikely to make the ICX considerably safer. I didn’t have the sources to seek out all attainable exploitable safety bugs within the ICX software program. As soon as I discovered one which glad a selected adversarial goal, I normally turned to investigating different elements of the system. It is vitally seemingly that there are different, equally essential flaws within the ICX which are but to be found. Absolutely defending it would require discovering and mitigating all of them, however attackers would solely have to seek out one.
And regarding the alternative of the earlier system, Halderman states:
The ICX BMDs might be compromised to the identical extent and as or extra simply than the AccuVote TS and TS-X DREs they changed. Each methods have related weaknesses, together with readily bypassed person authentication and software program validation, and susceptibility to malware that spreads from a central level to machines all through a jurisdiction. But with the BMD, these vulnerabilities are typically even simpler to take advantage of than on the DRE system, for the reason that ICX makes use of extra trendy and modular know-how that’s less complicated to analyze and modify.
Along with the preliminary price of $107,000,000, the Georgia Secretary of State is now requesting tens of hundreds of thousands extra for safety upgrades partially for a system that also gained’t be safe and, in truth, is much less safe than the outdated system it changed, as per the Halderman Report.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger should assume Georgians get pleasure from throwing large sums of their hard-earned taxpayer {dollars} into the bottomless pit of their susceptible digital voting machines.
