Georgia Secretary of State Requests MILLIONS for Voting Machine “Upgrades” for a System That Still Won’t Be Secure and Is Less Secure than Previous System | The Gateway Pundit

Earlier this month, the Georgia Dwelling Appropriations Committee convened to guage budgets for the Fiscal 12 months 2025.  In the middle of the hearing, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger began his plea for lots of of 1000’s of {{dollars}} further for the voting machines and election strategies that Georgia tax-payers merely purchased for $107 million in 2019.

Raffensperger began his plea for the Elections Division funding by claiming, “Since day 1, election security has been my excessive priority and may proceed to be so,” after which he referred to Georgia’s system as “battle-tested.”  He then asserts that Georgia is a “nationwide chief in elections” on account of they’d been the first state to have utilized “the trifecta of computerized voter registration, not lower than 17 days of early voting, which have been often called the ‘Gold Regular’, and ‘no excuse’ absentee voting.”

None of those devices he listed must be thought-about helpful to “election security.”

Raffensperger went on to request $32.3 million for FY25, with nearly two-thirds of the request “designed to deal with election security factors” for an entire of $20.2 million.  He moreover requested $6 million to alternate the “getting older voting machine vitality supplies” on the decrease than five-year-old strategies (which was moreover requested ultimate 12 months) along with $4,125,000 for QR Code Readers.  Georgia’s BMDs at current print the voter’s intent in a non-human-verifiable QR Code on the bodily paper ballot.

When the funding request was broken down further, it amounted to the subsequent:

• Elections Software program program Reinstall  – $10,432,696
• Security and Voter Upgrades – $11,839,160
• Investigations – $487,160
• Corporations – $3,275,000
• Elections Personnel Desires – $2,686,000
• Voter Contact/Guidelines Repairs – $3,195,000
• Expert Licensing Boards – $397,200

Raffensperger specifies that the “Software program program Reinstall” applies to all 159 counties and consists of 34,000 ballot marking devices (BMDs) and just about 3,800 ballot scanners.

All through questioning, Senator Max Burns launched up the present roll-out of Garvis Poll Pads and a dialogue at a November committee meeting regarding the poll pads, which Raffensperger was not in attendance.  Sen. Burns talked about that that they’d requested the amount spent on the Garvis Poll Pads and the place that money was allotted from.  Raffensperger didn’t know the general in the meanwhile nevertheless talked concerning the funding was from “bond funds redirected.”

Raffensperger deployed Garvis Poll Pads in municipal elections to assist with voter take a look at in. The poll pads are associated to the net and reliable sources say they’re merely hackable.

The Georgia Legislature didn’t approve the lots of of 1000’s to pay for… pic.twitter.com/vzo20iz1Om

— Debbie Dooley (@Crimsontider) December 28, 2023

When requested by Senator Burns regarding the effectiveness of the poll pads, Raffensperger responded that “complete, it went very correctly” with “only a few localized factors.”  He supplied no substantive description of or choice to any of those factors, nevertheless instead cited a “tips” that they’re engaged on.

Subsequent, Senator Brandon Seashore requested regarding the “9 vulnerabilities” inside the Halderman Report and Raffensperger’s declare that it may worth $32.5 million to “restore” these vulnerabilities.  Sen. Seashore requested if the newly-presented $10 million would adequately restore the machines.  Raffensperger claimed the model new request was “whittled down” and is also “sharpened” even further.

Raffensperger then doubled down that the implementation of these “fixes” acquired’t be able to be carried out until after the 2024 election, even when extra cash was allotted, as Sen. Seashore steered.  The SOS claimed that it may take 97,000 man-hours to interchange the previously-mentioned 34,000 BMDs, or roughly 2.9 hours per BMD.

In J Alex Halderman’s 2021 report that was not too way back unsealed by Select Amy Totenberg inside the Curling v. Raffensperger case, Halderman claims:

…in reviewing the processes it’s going to require an change of the virtually 45,000 objects of voting instruments, along with the next acceptance testing. This course of will take tens of lots of of manhours. Subsequently, the statewide switch to 5.17 will occur following the 2024 election cycle. It’s going to allow the state and counties to focus on executing municipal elections and working the Presidential cycle. It moreover permits the state to put collectively a thoughtful, thorough plan to roll out the latest software program program.

Notably regarding the “patch” of the BMDs, he states:

Among the many essential vulnerabilities I discovered is likely to be not lower than partially mitigated through changes to the ICX’s software program program, and I encourage Dominion and the State of Georgia to maneuver as shortly as doable to remedy them.  Nonetheless, merely patching these explicit points is unlikely to make the ICX significantly safer. I didn’t have the belongings to hunt out all doable exploitable security bugs inside the ICX software program program. As quickly as I found one which glad a particular adversarial purpose, I typically turned to investigating totally different sides of the system. It’s relatively most likely that there are totally different, equally essential flaws inside the ICX which might be however to be discovered. Completely defending it’s going to require discovering and mitigating all of them, nevertheless attackers would solely have to hunt out one.

And relating to the substitute of the sooner system, Halderman states:

The ICX BMDs is likely to be compromised to the an identical extent and as or further merely than the AccuVote TS and TS-X DREs they modified.  Every strategies have associated weaknesses, along with readily bypassed client authentication and software program program validation, and susceptibility to malware that spreads from a central stage to machines all by means of a jurisdiction. However with the BMD, these vulnerabilities are usually even less complicated to make use of than on the DRE system, as a result of the ICX makes use of additional fashionable and modular experience that’s simpler to investigate and modify.

Together with the preliminary worth of $107,000,000, the Georgia Secretary of State is now requesting tens of lots of of 1000’s further for security upgrades partially for a system that additionally acquired’t be secure and, in precise reality, is a lot much less secure than the earlier system it modified, as per the Halderman Report.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ought to suppose Georgians benefit from throwing massive sums of their hard-earned taxpayer {{dollars}} into the bottomless pit of their weak digital voting machines.