But that kind of change would create difficulties for auditing multipage ballots and drive up ballot printing costs borne by taxpayers. The secretary of state’s office has been discussing whether to abandon bar codes in favor of a full ballot for more than a year, Sterling said. If that happened, voters won’t be able to verify that their choices were what is actually counted. “These issues require unfettered physical access to election equipment, which is already prohibited,” a Dominion spokeswoman said.Ī hack that exploited voting touchscreens could alter bar codes so that ballots were tabulated inconsistently with the human-readable text of the ballot, according to the CISA report. But it does mean it’s time to act.”ĭominion said in a statement said the security of its voting system has been proven through thousands of elections and recounts. “That doesn’t mean it’s time to panic, and it doesn’t mean that there is proof that any past election has been tampered with. “The vulnerabilities are significant, and the state should take responsible steps promptly to reduce the risk that they’ll be exploited,” Halderman said. Halderman’s findings have been sealed in federal court since July, but CISA conducted its review to assess the threat to election security and provide advice to Georgia and jurisdictions in 16 other states that use the Dominion Democracy Suit ImageCast X voting equipment.Įlection officials should pursue improvements to election technology, ballot security and post-election audits, Halderman said. The vulnerabilities were discovered by Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who is an expert for plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit seeking to replace Georgia’s $138 million voting system with paper ballots filled out by hand. We have lots of mitigation, and that’s already built into our robust rules and laws.” “Some of the vulnerabilities are there, but they’re there in any system. “There’s no way anybody can sit there in a real election environment and exploit any of these things,” Sterling said. Sterling said the flaws were only found after a federal judge allowed a computer scientist access to voting equipment and passwords. Georgia’s statewide voting system uses touchscreens to print out paper ballots, which are then fed into scanning machines that record votes.īecause scanning machines read bar codes printed on the paper ballots, voters would have no way of knowing whether a hack had changed the bar code so that it didn’t match the printed text of their choices. In addition, hacks could infect voting equipment remotely if election workers used USB drives to transfer data from computers connected to the internet to election computers. Malicious code could be spread if someone gained physical access to voting touchscreens or the election management system computers that program them. “Many of these mitigations, which are typically standard practice in jurisdictions where these devices are in use, are able to detect exploitation of these vulnerabilities and in many cases would prevent attempts entirely if diligently applied, making it very unlikely that a malicious actor could exploit these vulnerabilities to affect an election,” Easterly said. Currently, state law only calls for one race to be audited every two years after general elections.ĬISA Director Jen Easterly said the agency is working with election officials to address potential security deficiencies. The secretary of state’s office will review the recommendations, seek additional election audits and look for opportunities to improve election worker training, said Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office.
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