Are Georgia’s voting machines accurate? Touchscreens undergo ‘health check’

GAINESVILLE — It was an easy test of Georgia’s Dominion Voting Systems machines, a low bar meant to show that they will count ballots correctly this fall.

A state election worker created 10 ballots from a recent race, inserted them into a scanner and checked that the results were accurate during a spot “health check” in Hall County’s election office Wednesday.

The exercise was an effort by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to reassure voters that voting computers can be trusted, along with upcoming testing to ensure they’re faithfully recording votes. Additional testing will be conducted through Election Day monitoring and hand-counted audits .

For a half-dozen election skeptics waving signs outside calling for “paper ballots please,” they said the demonstration was an unconvincing “dog and pony show.” They’re seeking ballots filled out by hand instead of printed by computers.

Raffensperger said touchscreens always produce accurate results during testing, and voters can check their choices on printed-out paper ballots. There’s no credible evidence that Dominion voting machines have been hacked or that votes have been flipped during a Georgia election.

“Trust but verify,” Raffensperger said, quoting former President Ronald Reagan. “Voters should have confidence that your vote has been accurately recorded, and that’s what we’re proving to voters today.”

Critics of Georgia’s Dominion voting technology say it’s vulnerable to election mischief, citing a federal cybersecurity agency’s warning and a courtroom demonstration showing that a touchscreen could be hacked within seconds if no one was watching.

They said Raffensperger’s preelection test does nothing to assuage concerns that an actual high-stakes election could be hijacked.

“It’s to comfort the sheep, to comfort the public that are not paying attention to the details,” Brian Parker, a Banks County voter wearing a “MAGA” hat, said after Raffensperger’s presentation.

Election security advocates have also expressed concerns after supporters of Donald Trump hired computer analysts to copy the state’s voting software in Coffee County following his loss in the 2020 election. In addition, programming errors resulted in a miscount in DeKalb County in 2022 that was later corrected through a hand count.

Distrust of Georgia’s voting equipment has grown since Trump falsely claimed the election was stolen, an allegation undermined by three vote counts , court cases and state investigations .

Roughly 25% of the state’s voting equipment in all 159 counties has gone through similar “health checks” over the past 16 months, said Chris Bellew, an elections systems specialist in Raffensperger’s office.

“We don’t ever find any discrepancies,” said Tom Braatz, an elections specialist in Hall County. “My greatest concern is that a scanner stops working because somebody slipped an ‘I Voted’ sticker on top of their ballot when they were casting their ballot. That’s generally the worst-case scenario that I deal with.”

By design, the voting machine test was a small-scale evaluation focused on making sure that computers count without errors.

Georgia’s voting system relies on touchscreens that print out paper ballots, which contain the text of voters’ choices along with a QR code that is then read by a scanning machine. While the computer vote count depends on the QR code , audits examine the readable words on the ballot.

At the end of the evaluation, totals from the test ballots, a scanner printout and an election computer all showed the same results in sample races for the Hall County Commission and state court judge.

Bob Coovert, a conservative voter from Gilmer County, said he’s concerned that Raffensperger didn’t secure the state’s voting system following the report from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency that identified weaknesses.

“He has taken no action to correct any of the vulnerabilities,” said Coovert, a member of Georgians for Truth, a group advocated for hand-marked paper ballots. “We should all have the right to a fair vote, and if that vote is being manipulated in any way, shape or form, that’s just about as serious of a crime as you can have. Not trying to fix it, that’s really serious.”

Raffensperger has said security precautions already minimize the real-world risk of tampering, but he declined to attempt a massive statewide rollout of the upgrade before this year’s election.

“How do you know bad actors aren’t changing anything? Well, we’ll test it before the election,” Bellew said. “It’s a lot of tests, and they’re as extensive as they can be.”

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