A judge is withholding the release of an audit report of Dominion voting machines in Georgia. Now the federal government and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has inserted itself into the case and is asking the judge to delay the report longer.
We reported on this case previously. Per our report a week ago:
A federal judge is being urged to release a report that, despite the secrecy surrounding it, appears to indicate there are potential flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment used in Georgia.
“The public deserves to know the context of J. Alex Halderman’s claims and his testimony regarding the 2020 election,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said last week in calling for the document to be released, the Washington Examiner reported.
“Georgia voters face an extreme risk that [ballot marking device]-based attacks could manipulate their individual votes and alter election outcomes,” Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor, said about the report last year, according to the Daily Beast.
In its reporting, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has indicated that the report, completed last year, describes how someone could hack the system to change votes, without saying whether or not this was ever accomplished.
Now the government is getting involved. According to the Washington Examiner:
A federal agency is reviewing a so-called secret report on alleged vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voting equipment.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of the Homeland Security Department, is assessing the fresh doubts being cast on the security of Dominion Voting Systems and is asking a judge to hold off on ordering the release of the report authored by Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, which could have implications for election technology used in states across the country.
“Such premature disclosure increases the risk that malicious actors may be able to exploit any vulnerabilities and threaten election security,” the CISA said in a court filing Thursday.
Halderman, an expert for plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit seeking to get Georgia to ditch electronic voting machines in favor of hand-marked paper ballots, was granted access to Dominion voting equipment in Fulton County for 12 weeks and produced a 25,000-word “secret report” that has been filed under seal, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican official who has vehemently defended the integrity of the 2020 election in the face of fraud claims by former President Donald Trump and his allies, has criticized Halderman and called for the report’s release, insisting that media reporting about it are sowing distrust ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Raffensperger said in a statement last month that the report is “not an objective, academic study by a non-biased actor.”
We’ve reported on the Dominion machines used in the 2020 audit across the country numerous times. In a recent article, we pointed out that the machines likely are not ‘hardened’ as is required of many machines used by the federal government.
But hardening is the activities taking place before the machines are put in use. We don’t know what the results of the Georgia audit are or what audit activities were performed of the machines.
For some reason, Dominion is reluctant to allow experts to take a forensic look at their machines. They are suing to prevent this from occurring in Pennsylvania currently.
