Last month U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg ruled that a lawsuit against Georgia’s use of electronic voting machines must go to a non-jury trial in January. She ordered Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to defend the state’s utilization of electronic voting prior to the upcoming presidential primary election because the lawsuit questions whether Georgia’s current system of computerized voting is safe or whether it is vulnerable to potential hacking.
However, the state (spending taxpayer money) is now appealing to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to keep Raffensperger from testifying.
Says one lawyer to James Magazine Online familiar with the case: “Raffensperger selected the system, repeatedly defends the system as secure, but now can’t take an hour or so in federal court to defend it.”
One of the attorneys defending Raffensperger, though, had this to say, according to the transcript: “As to the issues they have pointed out in their briefing, your honor, these are opinion statements of Secretary Raffensperger that just aren’t relevant to the case. What Secretary Raffensperger’s personal opinion is as to some specific matter has no relevance to whether the BMD (ballot marking device) system burdens the constitutional right of the plaintiffs in this matter. It is Secretary Raffensperger’s personal opinion.”
In other words, he cannot testify about how the system works or testify to facts to back up his claims. He only offers “opinions.” This obviously raises a lot of questions.
After all, Raffensperger, for example, specifically dismissed the findings of the Halderman report that warned of potential security breaches and has been cited by the judge as concerning. He has repeatedly talked about the security of the BMD system and even says his office did “health checks.” But, as our unnamed lawyer asks James Magazine Online, “Why are the plaintiffs not entitled to examine Raffensperger about these specific statements?” By the way, Totenberg’s 135-page ruling stems from a lawsuit originally filed by activists in Georgia who want the state to return to paper ballot use instead of using electronic voting machines. The Associated Press reported that the lawsuit was first filed in 2017 against touchscreen voting machines that Georgia used for roughly 15 years. But the lawsuit was later altered to challenge the new BMD election system the state purchased in 2019, claiming that the new electronic system is vulnerable to cyber-attack.
