In response to the requirement for a paper trail that identifies a voter’s intentions, Georgia election officials, along with regional Republicans and Democrats, want hand-marked votes back.
Morgan County Democratic Party Chairwoman Jeanne Dufort urged the state to use the Dominion 5.5.5-A voting system in its current configuration, which includes hand-numbered ballots generated by central and precinct scanners, and reserve the ICX touchscreen units for voters who require assistive technology, in a petition that was submitted to the State Election Board ( SEB ) for consideration during its Aug. 6 meeting.
Dufort explained to The Federalist that paper votes would still be “scanned as usual.” The election stop is the only thing that has changed. The vote may receive a document ballot, a sharpie, a scanner, and the election’s voting process will proceed exactly as it has before with the system since we first introduced it.
” The only change is how the poll is marked”, Dufort said.
Now, voters mark their ballot on a tablet before a print-out description and QR code of their vote is created.
Due to adopting the latest system, the state used a Dean program, which stands for direct-recording electronic devices.  ,
” We were using a ballot-less system called a DRE system…where you mark your ballot on a tablet and then there was n’t any physical ballot created, it kind of just went into a black hole on the computer”, Dufort told The Federalist. ” So that was a really bad discipline, not having actual evidence of your vote”.
In Curling v. Raffensperger, Judge Amy Totenberg decided that DRE systems may be eliminated in 2019. Totenberg avoided requiring the state to succumb to hand-marked ballots completely, though the devices did not produce a paper record of the votes cast.  ,
Georgia changed to a ballot-marking device ( BMD) system in response, printing out a paper record with a summary and QR code, and tabulating it using a BMD.  ,
In the most recent book of the Curling v. Raffensperger circumstance, that system has now been challenged in court. Judge Totenberg heard from the events in January, but six months later, she has yet to issue a decision as Election Time methods.
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The issue with the present system is that, according to Dufort, Dufort ibd.com/document/700878026/Curling-v-Raffensperger-Transcript-Volume-1″>testified during January evidence that the voter’s intentions can only be inferred from the overview and QR code printed. But printouts do n’t always get it right. Voters in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, in November were prompted to cast their ballots “yes” and “no” on the printing, and the opposite happened when the same voter did the same. The printed description of the discrepancy was noticed by voters. Election officials claimed that the error in the vote, which was said to have affected more than 300 machines, had no bearing on the registered vote.
Although Northampton County used various voting machines, there is a chance that problems like those in Northampton County will result in Republicans and Democrats in the Peach State calling for a return to paper vote to ensure that a voter’s real intentions are recorded on paper.
Dufort told The Federalist she wants the State Elections Board to find the present system “infeasible”, to prevent a situation in which the only “paper-record” of a politician’s purpose is one the computer makes.  ,
Under Georgia law, should the “use of voting equipment” be deemed “impossible or impracticable” , , the state may revert to using hand-marked ballots. Dufort, in an email to the State Election Board, argues the latest method is “infeasible” given” known absolute risks”. By creating a paper trail, Dufort and the Coalition for Good Governance’s complaint asserted that switching to hand-marked vote may lessen the risks to vote protection.  ,
” We should not invest in these touch screens for a variety of reasons, but this complaint is about potential risks that emerged and were confirmed following the 2020 vote,” Dufort said.  ,
On Monday, former Democrat Rep. John Barrow wrote to the SEB to urge the table to switch to hand-marked vote, arguing that the present method may not be “tamperproof” and putting emphasis on the need for a “paper trail.”
Barrow’s letter, whose copy was obtained by The Federalist, states that” the inability to confirm that the votes that are counted by machine on Election Day truly reflect the voter’s decision is sufficient to demand that this Board satisfy its commitment to require that paper vote be used.”
Salleigh Grubbs, the president of Cobb County Republican Party, told The Federalist she supports using paper vote as well, but the Morgan County GOP did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.  ,
It was too soon to update the models with safety areas, according to Raffensperger. I support report vote because he has chosen not to do the things that needed to be done to secure the vote, Grubbs said.
Although the condition may not implement the necessary safety modifications until after the November 2024 election, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was given information about flaws in the current system in July of 2021. In a report released in 2022, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency ( CISA ) identified “vulnerabilities affecting versions of the Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite ImageCast X, an in-person voting system that allows voters to mark their ballot.
CISA continued that the risks “present challenges that should be mitigated as soon as possible,” but added that there was” no evidence that these risks have been exploited in any primaries.”
In a letter to Raffensperger and the SEB in September 2022, a group of cybersecurity researchers argued that the state may have a “reliable, reputable history of each politician’s choices.”
” This provides ground truth of voter intent”, the letter states. ” Having a reliable real history of voting purpose enables administrators to check and verify that the vote calculation is accurate, and to identify and correct any mistakes that may have occurred, regardless of their cause,” says the statement.
University of Michigan computer science professor J. Alex Halderman, who served as an expert testimony in Curling v. Raffensperger, testified that there are risks with the latest ballot-marking system software. In their notice, Halderman wrote that “malware could cause the BMD to print invalid votes and spread softly to another voting machines and the county’s central election management system.”
The Federalist’s election editor, Brianna Lyman. With a diploma in global political economy, Brianna received her diploma from Fordham University. Her job has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Observe Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
