Quote:ATLANTA — Two groups are asking the state election board to ditch the state’s Dominion voting machines this fall, citing their faulty security. The board could take up the bipartisan request as soon as Tuesday.

Dominion voting system computers have been fixtures at elections in Georgia since the 2020 election. But the state election board is getting multidirectional pushback -- from the two political parties, and cybersecurity experts, saying they shouldn’t be used this fall.

"It's madness, actually, to go into a system and have all of our ballots relying on that," said Jeanne Dufort, chair of the Morgan County Democratic party Monday. She wants the board to switch to hand-marked paper ballots for the November presidential election.

Republican Debbie Dooley, an early backer of Donald Trump in 2015, has also asked the election board to replace the state’s computerized voting system with hand-marked paper ballots this fall.

They contend that computer hackers could manipulate elections without a trace. One such warning has come from the founder of Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity, Dr. Rich DeMillo, who talked to 11Alive in 2022.

"If you look at the series of breaches, global breaches of cybersecurity systems over the last two years, it’s story after story like this where some vulnerability in a system was ignored," said DeMillo, who believes eliminating ballot-marking computers would eliminate a hacking threat.

In January 2021, security cameras documented a group of Trump supporters entering the secure area of Coffee County’s election office, where they spent hours copying election software.

"We believe the experts who tell us that bad guys, foreign and domestic, are interested in overturning election results or interfering with them. And we absolutely believe they now have really good tools to do that," Dufort said.

Yet voters admitted to preferring casting votes on computerized devices.

“Computers are fine. I don’t see any problem with the computer voting,” voter William Hill told us in Gwinnett County in 2022.

"I think the system they have right now is really good. I like it. I like it a lot," added Gwinnett County voter Kim Clark.

In 2019, Georgia approved the purchase of 30,000 Dominion ballot marking devices under a $109 million contract. Politicians had staunchly backed the system. But cracks formed after the 2020 presidential election—disputed by Donald Trump—and after the security breach in Coffee County.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been among the most vocal backers of the Dominion system. His office declined a request for comment.

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I am fine with ditching computer touch screens to vote on. I prefer the paper ballots that you mark and scan.

However, most all places will use Dominion counting machines to process those paper ballots.

(07-31-2024 02:22 PM)Redwingtom Wrote:  I am fine with ditching computer touch screens to vote on. I prefer the paper ballots that you mark and scan.

However, most all places will use Dominion counting machines to process those paper ballots.

Which is the real problem.

Touch screens with printed ballots that you check yourself are fine. That's what we do now. You have a check on the system.

They had a Democratic primary in Dekalb county (part of Atlanta is in Dekalb) for county commissioner. Machines showed one person in first, who after a recount ended up 3rd and out of the runoff. The person in 3rd realized she had no votes in her own precinct and requested a manual count and ended up first and won the runoff. It was blamed on a software change to account for someone who dropped out of the race.

This late? I don’t think so, Democrats on board only b/c new processes make it easier to mess around.

Any system that you can totally eff up the vote count and switch nearly all of the votes to the other candidate just because an employee failed to plug in a thumb drive to update software is a crappy system.

BTW that is what happened in Milton Township in Antrim County MI that started the entire sh!t show in 2020 (my polling place).

We have machines and paper in El Paso.

We do scantron type of ballots in Florida and then the voter themselves feed it into the machine.

(07-31-2024 02:22 PM)Redwingtom Wrote:  I am fine with ditching computer touch screens to vote on. I prefer the paper ballots that you mark and scan.

However, most all places will use Dominion counting machines to process those paper ballots.

That's how we vote here in my county precinct. Our county is small enough, however, that we don't really need vote-counting machines. It's just more convenient to use them and get the count over and done with.

As for paper ballots, it seems nobody remembers that Senate election that gave us Franken. Hand counters trying to mind read voters.

Or the hanging chads in Florida.

(07-31-2024 04:25 PM)bullet Wrote:  As for paper ballots, it seems nobody remembers that Senate election that gave us Franken. Hand counters trying to mind read voters.

Or the hanging chads in Florida.

Oh, I remember. I just want there to be a paper trail.