An audit of ballots cast in Cherokee County in the May 24 primary and June 21 runoff elections confirmed the county’s certified results, the county’s election department reported. The elections board initiated a risk-limited audit, conducted Wednesday and Thursday, of all early voting May 24 primary ballots at the Oak Grove precinct and June 21 Election Day ballots for the Democratic lieutenant governor runoff and the two Republican school board runoffs at the county’s Dixie, Hillside, Neese, Clayton, R.T. Jones and Teasley precincts. The precincts, other than Oak Grove, were selected at random. Elections officials initially planned to audit four precincts plus Oak Grove early voting to audit 10% of the precincts, the elections department said, but due to low numbers they added two precincts, for a total of seven audited precincts. The overall margin of error was 1.69%, with 294 votes separating the audit total and the total for those precincts as tabulated by the voting machines, Elections Director Anne Dover said. “We were very pleased with the outcome of the audit,” she said in an email. “The margin of error was 1.69%. This difference is well below the 10% mark we had set, and is below the State’s margin of error that was given to us for the November 2020 hand count, which was 5%.”
Georgia: Election security experts seek precautions after Coffee County breach | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A group of computer scientists and election integrity advocates are calling for Georgia to abandon voting touchscreens and conduct more audits of this fall’s elections following the revelation that several supporters of Donald Trump coordinated the copying of election software in Coffee County. They asked the State Election Board to switch to hand-marked paper ballots instead of continuing to use Dominion Voting Systems touchscreens that print out paper ballots, according to a letter sent Thursday. “The release of the Dominion software into the wild has measurably increased the risk to the real and perceived security of the election to the point that emergency action is warranted,” said the letter by 13 people, including two Georgia Tech professors. Several tech experts working for then-Trump attorney Sidney Powell copied an election server, memory cards and other voting equipment in Coffee County on Jan. 7, 2021, according to documents subpoenaed in a lawsuit. Security video showed that Cathy Latham, one of Georgia’s fake electors who tried to cast the state’s votes for Trump, escorted the technicians into the county elections office. The letter to the State Election Board said the breach presents a danger that copied software could be exploited to create malware that could make voting equipment print incorrect votes, though there’s no evidence that has happened in an election so far. Three vote counts found that Democrat Joe Biden won Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, and investigations have repeatedly discredited claims of fraud.
Full Article: Georgia Election 2022: Election data copying spurs calls for changes
