Dominion Voting Systems on Jan. 3 filed a motion asking a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court to limit the Pennsylvania General Assembly’s right to inspect the voting machines that Fulton County used in the 2020 presidential election, Newsweek reported.
Republican state lawmakers want to perform a forensic audit on the voting machines that Dominion Voting Systems provided.
Dominion complained in the filing that the Republican lawmakers have not enlisted an accredited or experienced auditor to review the machines. Dominion also claimed, as it has in previous audit cases, that the auditors will damage or decertify the voting machines by taking images of the data on them.
The Denver-based voting machine company said that the auditor should conduct the forensic analysis at a federally certified voting system test lab or at a lab used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The Commonwealth Court has given the Republican lawmakers, Fulton County officials, and Dominion until Jan. 10 to agree upon details for the audit.
State Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Franklin, who has led the investigation effort, said that the forensic audit will determine whether Fulton County used the same voting machines that Pennsylvania certified for use in the 2020 election.
One theory suggests that Dominion failed to “harden” Fulton County’s voting machines prior to the election, in which case the state may have erroneously certified insecure machines, Gateway Pundit reported.
“System hardening is the process that secures computing systems by reducing the attack surface to make them hack-proof,” Enterprise Networking Planet explained. “It consists of a set of tools and methodologies that removes the non-essential services, thus minimizing the security risks to your system as much as possible.”
The evidence for this failure is that Dominion voting machines have Microsoft SQL, a database management software, on them, which can store and send information through the internet.
In a manual on the Democracy Suite system, Dominion openly admits to having “Dell servers, Cisco network equipment, Microsoft SQL Server RDBMS as well as a complete hosting platform based on Microsoft .NET technology” on their voting machines.
In an examination of Dominion’s machines presented to the Texas Secretary of State, the Microsoft software was found but described as a “hardened Windows operating system.”
