In response to recent revelations that technicians – hired by the Trump campaign and assisted by one of Georgia’s “fake electors”– accessed and copied voting system software in Coffee County, Georgia in early 2021, Free Speech For People coordinated a letter from election security experts to the Georgia State Elections Board, urging the Board to take additional precautions to protect Georgia’s elections.

According to individuals present, the technicians copied all of the voting system software in each piece of voting equipment, including the tabulators, ballot marking devices, election management servers and pollpads. The voting system software was uploaded to a ShareFile on the Internet, and shared with multiple individuals and entities. It is unknown exactly how many people have accessed the software, or distributed it to others.

The letter states: “The illegal copying of software and data (“disk images”) from the Georgia election management system (EMS) and voting device software, which occurred more than 20 months ago, constitutes a serious threat to Georgia’s election security.”

Releasing voting system software “into the wild,” allows potential bad actors the ability to reverse engineer the source code and study it for vulnerabilities. Attackers could also create a mock voting system that can be probed to identify ways to exploit the vulnerabilities or infect it with malware.

Because Georgia requires all in-person balloting to be marked on a computerized electronic ballot marking device that could be corrupted, its risk profile is more insecure compared to states where voters mark ballots with pens. The experts urged the State Elections Board to take immediate action to safeguard Georgia’s ballots writing: “This newly heightened risk can be mitigated by critical but straightforward action. First, Georgia should immediately discontinue the universal use of the Dominion ICX BMD for in-person voters, and instead provide voters with emergency hand-marked paper ballots to be tabulated by the current system’s optical scanners.” The experts also urged the Board to implement robust, post-election audits of all election contests. Current practice in Georgia is to audit only one state-wide contest every two years.

The letter was reported by the Associated Press and the Atlanta Journal Constitution and can be found here.