“All officials involved in November’s municipal elections or any county election have urgent crucial decisions to make on how the election should be conducted in the face of now unassailable scientific evidence that touchscreen ballot marking device (BMD) elections are not secure,” says Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Democrat-leaning Coalition for Good Governance.
It’s not only Republicans who have been attacking election and ballot security, as well as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in recent years. Marks is no Republican but is trying to get activists of all persuasions to take a critical look at BMD and DRE (direct recording electronic) machine voting.
She writes in an open letter to Georgians: “In our Curling v. Raffensperger BMD lawsuit (the same lawsuit in which the DREs were declared unconstitutional), plaintiffs’ experts’ rebuttal reports were submitted (on August 2nd) to attorneys for the Secretary of State, the State Election Board and the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections. Dr. J. Alex Halderman’s report is of urgent concern and discloses the fact that his 25,000-word initial report (under seal by court order) discloses “serious vulnerabilities” and the “steps for exploiting those vulnerabilities to alter individual votes and election outcomes in Georgia.”
You can read technology/security expert Halderman’s highly summarized report here, but, as Marks notes, “his original detailed report is sealed by the court to avoid publicly disclosing the details of the many ways to exploit the BMD system in undetectable attacks.” (Halderman has also offered to prepare a more detailed but abridged report for the public.)
Additionally. Marks says, Dr. Philip Stark and Dr. Andrew Appel also submitted compelling important reports here and here on why the BMD results cannot be audited.
“Given these dire warnings from the nation’s top experts,” Marks says “it is incumbent on local officials to reconsider their use of BMDs this fall, and instead use hand marked paper ballots with voluntary robust audits.” She notes Georgia’s boards of local elections have the authority to use hand marked paper ballots in municipal elections. (O.C.G.A. §21-2-300(a)(2)) Additionally, Marks says, a county board always has the right to choose hand marked ballots in any election if the use of the voting system is impossible or impracticable. (O.C.G.A. § 21-2-281) She argues that it’s “hard to imagine more ‘“impracticable’ conditions than the serious flaws that Dr. Halderman found exist in Georgia’s BMDs.”
Marks concludes: “We sometimes hear officials say, ‘The BMDs worked fine during 2020. We didn’t have a problem.’ That reflects a lack of understanding that the high-risk attacks are silent and undetectable. No one would know if there were such manipulation, and it would be virtually impossible to find out now.”
The Committee for Good Governance urges Georgia to “take immediate steps to plan to conduct hand marked paper ballot elections, counted by optical scanner and audited with statistically valid audits by sample hand counts. For small municipal elections, hand counting is feasible and a very transparent process, and has been the choice of many Georgia cities for years.” And the committee is hoping both Republicans and Democrats take note.
