Recently the PBS NewsHour aired a segment that highlighted the weaknesses and risks caused by using computerized touchscreen voting machines to record vote selections on a paper ballot – instead of marking paper ballots with a pen, the most common voting method in the country. 

The segment featured Dr. J. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Michigan. Halderman is an expert in the ongoing Curling v. Raffensperger litigation. (Curling v. Raffensperger was filed in 2017, does not allege any election was wrongfully decided, and was not part of any effort to overturn the 2020 election.) 

As an expert in the case, Halderman examined the computerized touchscreen ballot marking devices (BMDs) used in Georgia and found multiple, significant security vulnerabilities that were confirmed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Every in-person voter in Georgia must use the computerized voting devices to mark their vote choices which are recorded and counted from a QR code that cannot be deciphered by the voter. 

“Fundamentally it’s a problem anytime you’re going to put a potentially vulnerable computer between the voter and the only records of their vote,”  Halderman told the NewsHour.

Speaking with NewsHour’s Miles O’Brien, Georgia’s chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling dismissed Halderman’s findings claiming that Halderman did not take into account the physical security protections, which Sterling claims would make it impossible to exploit the vulnerabilities. 

But in fact, Halderman’s extensive, 95 page expert’s report examined how the machines are typically stored, sealed, secured, and deployed, then identified ways an attacker could subvert existing safeguards to compromise the touchscreen BMDs to undetectably change the QR codes, contrary to Sterling’s claims to the NewsHour. 

Furthermore, as the segment noted, in 2021, unauthorized operatives, working on behalf of the Trump campaign, had unfettered access to the voting system in a south Georgia county for days, allowing them to copy sensitive proprietary voting system software. “It is one of the most infamous security breaches in U.S. Election history,” said Miles O’Brien. The breach was not uncovered by the Secretary of State or law enforcement, but by  the plaintiffs in the Curling litigation Coalition for Good Governance,  its co-plaintiffs, and attorneys at Morrison and Foerster. n.

The segment noted that the voting system vendor released a software update it purports will eliminate the vulnerabilities Halderman identified, but Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told the NewsHour the state will not update the BMDs before the election because updating all 35,000 devices used across the state will take months. 

The NewsHour did not address the fact that the relief sought by the Curling plaintiffs – switching to handmarked paper ballots counted by the same scanners currently in use – would eliminate the 35,000 computerized touchscreen devices, and as a result, end all future labor intensive updates and programming. 

Free Speech For People supports the plaintiffs’ aim to eliminate the mandated use of BMDs by all voters (while retaining accessible devices for voters that need assistive technology). Learn more about universal use BMDs here. 

The Curling v. Raffensperger suit is in federal court in the Northern District of Georgia. Docket number: 1:17-cv-02989-AT. Plaintiffs include Donna Curling, Donna Price, Jeff Schoenberg  and Coalition for Good Governance. 

Watch the NewsHour report here.