Georgia Won’t Update Dominion Voting Machines Before 2024, Despite Cybersecurity Expert Warnings

Without election reform, the country is over. The fix is in.

Critics of Georgia’s plan to wait until after next year’s presidential election to install a software update to address security flaws on the state’s voting equipment called that irresponsible, saying the machines would be left open to attack.

The vulnerabilities in the Dominion Voting Systems equipment were identified by an expert witness in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Georgia’s election system. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, last year published an advisory based on those findings that urges election officials to take steps to mitigate the risks “as soon as possible.”

Georgia won’t update Dominion voting machines before 2024, despite cybersecurity expert warnings

The Georgia secretary of state’s office is relying on a report commissioned by Dominion regarding the company’s voting machines.
>Natalia Mittelstadt

Georgia is delaying a software update for its Dominion voting machines until after the 2024
A nearly 2-year-old report was finally made public last week and showed Dominion voting machines had significant vulnerabilities, which led the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to issue a public advisory last year based on the findings.

However, Georgia election officials say that the machines won’t be updated until after the 2024 elections because it’s such a massive undertaking.

The report was completed in July 2021 by University of Michigan Professor of Computer Science and Engineering J. Alex Halderman with Professor Drew Springall, of Auburn University, and focused in part on vulnerabilities they found after examining Dominion’s ImageCast X Ballot Marking Devices for three months.

A redacted copy of the report was released June 14 by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division. ​

The report was completed on behalf of the plaintiffs in the case of Curling v. Raffensperger and found the Dominion machines are vulnerable to vote flipping.

Halderman suggested the machines were capable of being manipulated in mere minutes by bad actors, saying the QR codes on printed ballots could be altered and malware installed on individual machines “with only brief physical access.”

The broader voting system could be attacked if bad actors have the same access to it as certain county-level election officials, the report also concluded.

However, Halderman stated there is no evidence such vulnerabilities have been exploited in past elections.

“My technical findings leave Georgia voters with greatly diminished grounds to be confident that the votes they cast on [the current Dominion ballot-marking devices] are secured, that their votes will be counted correctly, or that any future elections using Georgia’s [ballot-marking devices] will be reasonably secure from attack and produce correct results,” he wrote.

Last June, in response to Halderman’s report, CISA urged election officials to mitigate the risks caused by the vulnerabilities in the Dominion machines but also stated the agency “has no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in any elections.”

Following the Halderman report, Dominion commissioned the nonprofit MITRE Corp.’s National Election Security Lab to respond to the findings. The report, completed in July 2022, was released along with the Halderman report.

The MITRE report said the Halderman report findings were “operationally infeasible” when considering adherence to strict security measures, normal voting practices, and scale considerations.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a statement following the release of the MITRE report that it “confirms that Georgia’s election infrastructure is secured by the toughest safeguards.”

He also said: “For years, election deniers have created a cottage industry of ever-shifting claims about conspiracies to change votes, steal elections and undermine voter confidence. This report says it all: Voting machines do not flip votes. Cast ballots are counted as the voter intended. Georgia elections are secure.”

Dominion on Wednesday referred Just the News to its website for a response to the MITRE report.