Georgia Secretary of State Requests MILLIONS for Voting Machine “Upgrades” for a System That Still Won’t Be Secure and Is Less Secure than Previous System | The Gateway Pundit

Earlier this month, the Georgia Home Appropriations Committee convened to evaluate budgets for the Fiscal 12 months 2025.  In the course of the hearing, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger started his plea for hundreds of thousands of {dollars} extra for the voting machines and election methods that Georgia tax-payers simply bought for $107 million in 2019.

Raffensperger started his plea for the Elections Division funding by claiming, “Since day 1, election safety has been my high precedence and can proceed to be so,” after which he referred to Georgia’s system as “battle-tested.”  He then asserts that Georgia is a “nationwide chief in elections” as a result of they had been the primary state to have applied “the trifecta of computerized voter registration, not less than 17 days of early voting, which have been known as the ‘Gold Normal’, and ‘no excuse’ absentee voting.”

None of these gadgets he listed needs to be thought-about useful to “election safety.”

Raffensperger went on to request $32.3 million for FY25, with almost two-thirds of the request “designed to handle election safety points” for a complete of $20.2 million.  He additionally requested $6 million to exchange the “getting older voting machine energy provides” on the lower than five-year-old methods (which was additionally requested final 12 months) in addition to $4,125,000 for QR Code Readers.  Georgia’s BMDs at present print the voter’s intent in a non-human-verifiable QR Code on the bodily paper poll.

When the funding request was damaged down additional, it amounted to the next:

• Elections Software program Reinstall  – $10,432,696
• Safety and Voter Upgrades – $11,839,160
• Investigations – $487,160
• Firms – $3,275,000
• Elections Personnel Wants – $2,686,000
• Voter Contact/Checklist Upkeep – $3,195,000
• Skilled Licensing Boards – $397,200

Raffensperger specifies that the “Software program Reinstall” applies to all 159 counties and includes 34,000 poll marking gadgets (BMDs) and virtually 3,800 poll scanners.

Throughout questioning, Senator Max Burns introduced up the current roll-out of Garvis Ballot Pads and a dialogue at a November committee assembly relating to the ballot pads, which Raffensperger was not in attendance.  Sen. Burns talked about that that they had requested the quantity spent on the Garvis Ballot Pads and the place that cash was allotted from.  Raffensperger didn’t know the overall at the moment however talked about the funding was from “bond funds redirected.”

Raffensperger deployed Garvis Ballot Pads in municipal elections to help with voter test in. The ballot pads are related to the web and dependable sources say they’re simply hackable.

The Georgia Legislature didn’t approve the hundreds of thousands to pay for… pic.twitter.com/vzo20iz1Om

— Debbie Dooley (@Crimsontider) December 28, 2023

When requested by Senator Burns in regards to the effectiveness of the ballot pads, Raffensperger responded that “total, it went very properly” with “just a few localized points.”  He provided no substantive description of or decision to any of these points, however as an alternative cited a “guidelines” that they’re engaged on.

Subsequent, Senator Brandon Seashore requested in regards to the “9 vulnerabilities” within the Halderman Report and Raffensperger’s declare that it could value $32.5 million to “repair” these vulnerabilities.  Sen. Seashore requested if the newly-presented $10 million would adequately repair the machines.  Raffensperger claimed the brand new request was “whittled down” and could also be “sharpened” even additional.

Raffensperger then doubled down that the implementation of those “fixes” received’t be capable of be carried out till after the 2024 election, even when more cash was allotted, as Sen. Seashore steered.  The SOS claimed that it could take 97,000 man-hours to replace the previously-mentioned 34,000 BMDs, or roughly 2.9 hours per BMD.

In J Alex Halderman’s 2021 report that was not too long ago unsealed by Choose Amy Totenberg within the Curling v. Raffensperger case, Halderman claims:

…in reviewing the processes it is going to require an replace of the almost 45,000 items of voting tools, together with the following acceptance testing. This course of will take tens of hundreds of manhours. Subsequently, the statewide transfer to five.17 will happen following the 2024 election cycle. It will permit the state and counties to concentrate on executing municipal elections and operating the Presidential cycle. It additionally permits the state to place collectively a considerate, thorough plan to roll out the most recent software program.

Particularly relating to the “patch” of the BMDs, he states:

Among the crucial vulnerabilities I found might be not less than partially mitigated via adjustments to the ICX’s software program, and I encourage Dominion and the State of Georgia to maneuver as shortly as doable to treatment them.  Nonetheless, merely patching these particular issues is unlikely to make the ICX considerably safer. I didn’t have the assets to seek out all doable exploitable safety bugs within the ICX software program. As soon as I discovered one which happy a selected adversarial goal, I often turned to investigating different facets of the system. It is rather probably that there are different, equally crucial flaws within the ICX which can be but to be found. Totally defending it is going to require discovering and mitigating all of them, however attackers would solely have to seek out one.

And regarding the substitute of the earlier system, Halderman states:

The ICX BMDs might be compromised to the identical extent and as or extra simply than the AccuVote TS and TS-X DREs they changed.  Each methods have related weaknesses, together with readily bypassed consumer authentication and software program validation, and susceptibility to malware that spreads from a central level to machines all through a jurisdiction. But with the BMD, these vulnerabilities are typically even simpler to use than on the DRE system, because the ICX makes use of extra trendy and modular expertise that’s easier to analyze and modify.

Along with the preliminary value of $107,000,000, the Georgia Secretary of State is now requesting tens of hundreds of thousands extra for safety upgrades partially for a system that also received’t be safe and, in actual fact, is much less safe than the previous system it changed, as per the Halderman Report.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger should suppose Georgians get pleasure from throwing large sums of their hard-earned taxpayer {dollars} into the bottomless pit of their weak digital voting machines.