Early last month state Sen. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta, issued a media release demanding answers from Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger over current elections system vulnerabilities. Receiving no response, he took to the Senate floor this week to renew his call to action.
“Since the press release on November 9th I have had no response from the Secretary of State or his office,” said Beach. “If you knew there were vulnerabilities on your phone, and that bad actors could obtain your personal information, would you not upgrade it and put controls in to protect your information? I believe the answer to be yes. Other states that use the Dominion machines are installing the upgrades now as we speak. Secretary of State Raffensperger wants to wait until after the 2024 elections next November. My question is why? Why wait? Let’s fix it now.”
Beach has joined Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and various other Republicans and Democrats concerned over a report from Dr. J. Alex Halderman, a cybersecurity professor from the University of Michigan (and a Democrat) that singled out major weaknesses in Georgia’s Dominion voting machines. That report was backed up by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which issued a security advisory in June of 2022 urging every state to fix the vulnerabilities “as soon as possible.”
In March of this year Dominion released a patch that it claimed would fix the vulnerabilities, which several states that use the software independently tested and verified. Yet Raffensperger’s office said it would not implement the update until 2025, citing a lack of time to install the patch to all of the state’s voting machines. Beach and others insist there is the time and money to do it.
Expect to see the issue addressed, one way or another, during the upcoming 2024 legislative session beginning in January.
