(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Despite cybersecurity experts warning of vulnerabilities, Georgia delayed a software update for its Dominion voting machines until after the 2024 presidential election.
Last week, a nearly 2-year-old report was made public and showed that Dominion voting machines had significant vulnerabilities, Just the News reported. The findings led the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [CISA] to issue a public advisory last year.
Despite the revealed information, Georgia election officials said that the machines won’t be updated until after the 2024 elections because it’s such a massive undertaking.
In July 2021, University of Michigan Professor of Computer Science and Engineering J. Alex Halderman with Professor Drew Springall, of Auburn University, completed the report and focused in part on vulnerabilities they found after examining Dominion’s ImageCast X Ballot Marking Devices for three months.
On June 14, 2022, a redacted copy of the report was released by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division.
Just the News wrote that the report was completed on behalf of the plaintiffs in the case of Curling v. Raffensperger and found that the Dominion machines are vulnerable to vote-flipping.
Halderman said that the machines were capable of being easily manipulated in mere minutes by bad actors, adding that the QR codes on printed ballots could be altered and malware installed on individual machines “with only brief physical access.”
The report also concluded that the broader voting system could be attacked if bad actors have the same access to it as certain county-level election officials.
However, Halderman said that these vulnerabilities could not 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 said.
