Georgia: Voting machine critics investigated by Georgia election officials | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia election officials are investigating two prominent critics for allegedly intruding into voting areas during a test run of the state’s new voting machines. The two people under investigation said the investigation is an intimidation tactic by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office. Marilyn Marks, a plaintiff in a lawsuit demanding that Georgia switch to hand-marked paper ballots, and Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech cybersecurity expert, are accused of “interfering with voters by being in an unauthorized area” during the Nov. 5 election, said Walter Jones, a spokesman for Raffensperger. “The secretary of state takes voters’ reports that individuals are violating election law and undermining the integrity of our state and local elections seriously,” Jones said in a statement. Marks said Raffensperger is attempting to marginalize skeptics of the state’s new voting system, which combines touchscreens and printed ballots. The system is scheduled to be rolled out to voters statewide during the March 24 presidential primary.

Georgia: Election officials investigate prominent critics | Ben Nadler/Associated Press

Georgia election officials have opened an investigation into two prominent critics of the state’s new touchscreen voting machines, secretary of state Brad Raffensperger’s office confirmed Wednesday. Those critics called the investigation an attempt to intimidate detractors of the new machines. Marilyn Marks, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance, and Richard DeMillo, a cybersecurity expert and Georgia Tech professor, are accused of “interfering with voters by being in unauthorized areas” of voting locations while observing pilot elections conducted on the new machines on Nov. 5. Raffensperger spokesman Walter Jones says the investigation was launched after complaints from “poll workers and voters” and that Marks and DeMillo were “in an area of the polling place where only voters and election officials are allowed to be.” Marks responded, “I have absolutely no idea what this could be about other than just an effort to try to discredit us, because much of what we observed was not pretty.” Marks said they worked with local election officials that day and hadn’t heard any concerns at the time. She said Raffensperger should be promoting open and transparent elections rather than “trying to make examples of people who want to exercise their right to learn more, who want to observe, who want to promote transparency.”

Pennsylvania: ‘You should be pretty worried’: Fixing York County’s election system before 2020 votes | Logan Hullinger/York Dispatch

The maker of York County’s new voting machines pledged to have support on hand for all of next year’s elections after a tumultuous rollout of the system earlier this month that delayed election results for days. A representative for Dominion Voting Systems made the announcement Thursday, Nov. 14, during a debriefing that included the county commissioners, nearly all of the county’s state lawmakers, poll workers and election officials. Kay Stimson, the company’s vice president of government affairs, said Dominion also would work with county officials to reevaluate the number of machines needed in each of the 159 precincts. Based of the problems during the Nov. 5 municipal election, Lawmakers were particularly concerned about the 2020 voting — which includes a special election in January, the primary in April and the presidential contest in November. “If you voted in York, you should be pretty worried,” state Rep. Seth Grove, R-Dover Township, said after the meeting.

National: Expensive, Glitchy Voting Machines Expose 2020 Hacking Risks | Kartikay Mehrotra and Margaret Newkirk/Bloomberg

The first sign something was wrong with Northampton County, Pennsylvania’s state-of-the-art voting system came on Election Day when a voter called the local Democratic Party chairman to say a touchscreen in her precinct was acting “finicky.” As she scrolled down the ballot, the tick-marks next to candidates she’d selected kept disappearing. Her experience Nov. 5 was no isolated glitch. Over the course of the day, the new election machinery, bought over the objections of cybersecurity experts, continued to malfunction. Built by Election Systems & Software, the ExpressVote XL was designed to marry touchscreen technology with a paper-trail for post-election audits. Instead, it created such chaos that poll workers had to crack open the machines, remove the ballot records and use scanners summoned from across state lines to conduct a recount that lasted until 5 a.m. In one case, it turned out a candidate that the XL showed getting just 15 votes had won by about 1,000. Neither Northampton nor ES&S know what went wrong. Digital voting machines were promoted in the wake of a similarly chaotic scene 19 years ago: the infamous punch-card ballots and hanging chads of south Florida that tossed the presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore into uncertainty.

Georgia: Problem with new election equipment delays voting in Georgia counties | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A glitch with Georgia’s new voter check-in computers caused delays in most of the six counties testing it, causing some precincts to stay open late to accommodate voters who left without casting their ballots. The problem occurred in at least four of the six counties where the new voting system was being tested Tuesday before it’s rolled out statewide to 7.4 million registered voters during the March 24 presidential primary. Most Georgia voters were still using the state’s 17-year-old voting technology Tuesday. Poll workers weren’t able to create voter access cards on new voting check-in computers manufactured by KnowInk. Those cards activate touchscreen voting machines so that they display the ballot associated with the jurisdictions where voters are registered. In Decatur County, near the Florida border, some voters waited 45 minutes for the problem to be fixed. Decatur election officials decided to keep precincts open an hour later, until 8 p.m. “Let’s get these kinks resolved now, before March 24,” said Carol Heard, chief elections officer for Decatur County. “My hair was red before today. Now it’s gray.” The same issue also occurred in Bartow, Carroll, Paulding and Lowndes counties. Catoosa County had no problems.

Indiana: Machines reportedly switching votes plagues Indiana county for second straight election | Owen Daugherty/The Hill

Voting machines reportedly switching people’s choices have troubled a county in Indiana for the second consecutive election. Tippecanoe County experienced issues with machines switching people’s selections on Election Day on Tuesday at multiple locations, according to the Lafayette Post & Courier. Tippecanoe County Clerk Julie Roush was notified by a voter who called in saying their selection on a voting machine at a local polling location would be changed by the machine, which would mark an “X” for someone other than the candidate the voter wanted. Roush said she checked the calibration on three different voting machines after receiving a call. Robert Kurtz, a resident of West Lafayette who went to vote Tuesday, recorded a video of a touch screen on a voting machine that would not record the proper selection. “When I touched a square next to a candidate’s name, the machine selected the square for the candidate above,” Kurtz told the new outlet. “If I touched the square for the candidate at the top of the list, nothing happened.”

Pennsylvania: Problems with York County’s new paper ballots | Shelly Stallsmith/York Daily Record

Jerry Brenchley has lived in West Manheim Township, York County, since 1984. Before that, he lived in Los Angeles. The 72-year-old voted in every election in both areas because his grandparents told him that’s the only way to make sure his voice is heard. Brenchley’s voice isn’t going to be heard in this election because, for the first time, he didn’t vote. He and his wife tried, he said. They stood in line at St. David’s Evangelical Lutheran Church for nearly an hour and still hadn’t reached the registration table to get a ballot. “There were five or six ladies handing out ballots,” Brenchley said. “And one came out and said, ‘I’m sorry, they just sent us one machine.’ People were walking out. “This stinks, I mean it really stinks.” Brenchley isn’t alone in his complaints. Voters around York County were voicing concerns about the new paper ballot system. They are worried about this year’s election, but Tuesday’s long lines and voting difficulties have them more concerned about next year’s presidential election. “We waited 2½ hours to vote in 2016,” Valerie Herman said Tuesday. “If things don’t change for next year, we’ll have to camp out.”

Georgia: State rushes to install voting machines before 2020 election | Mark Niesse & David Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

With a presidential election on the line in 2020, Georgia is switching to a new voting company, Dominion Voting Systems, that state evaluators ranked second-best and that critics said will leave elections vulnerable. Dominion, based in Denver, must rush to install 30,000 voting machines for 7 million Georgia voters before the March 24 presidential primary, the largest rollout of elections equipment in U.S. history. Most voters in Tuesday’s local elections will cast ballots on Georgia’s 17-year-old machines, and voters in six counties are testing Dominion’s machines. The company faces intense scrutiny in Georgia, one of the most competitive states in the nation entering an election year featuring President Donald Trump and two U.S. Senate seats on the ballot. The challenge for Dominion is to seamlessly introduce computer-printed paper ballots in a state criticized last year over allegations of vote flipping, missing voter registrations, precinct closures, long lines and voter purges. The swift transition to new voting equipment has raised eyebrows far from Georgia. “What Georgia is trying to do basically blows my mind,” said Dwight Shellman, an election official at the Colorado secretary of state’s office. His state adopted a Dominion system in 2016. “We had 2 1/2 years to do it, and it was challenging,” Shellman said. “I can’t imagine implementing the number of counties Georgia has in, what, two months? Three months?” Actually, the work will take eight months. But the challenge remains daunting.

National: Voting Village brings equipment to lawmakers to boost urgency on election security | Sean Lyngaas/CyberScoop

A year from the 2020 election and with a new round of election security funding stalled in Congress, the DEF CON Voting Village organizers have again taken to Capitol Hill to raise awareness about software vulnerabilities in voting equipment. This time, they brought the equipment with them to drive home their point. “If we’re going to meaningfully introduce funding or introduce new technologies for 2020, time is rapidly running out to be able to do that,” Matt Blaze, a professor at Georgetown University and co-organizer of the Voting Village, told CyberScoop. “We need to act pretty fast.” A handful of House Democrats and their staffers sauntered up to equipment on display, including a ballot-marking device and an electronic voting machine, to ask the researchers about the software bugs they found. “This is really helpful in understanding that these aren’t just abstract problems, that these are real things,” Blaze, an expert in cryptology, told CyberScoop. This is the second time in a month that the Voting Village has hosted an event on Capitol Hill. Last month, Blaze and Harri Hursti, another village organizer, unveiled the village’s annual report on flaws in voting gear that could be exploited by hackers.

New Jersey: Questions of vulnerability surround New Jersey’s aging voting machines | Rob Anthes/Community News

In 2004, Hopewell resident Stephanie Harris went to her polling place for the presidential primary, never expecting what was about to happen would alter her life and the public discourse around voter security for the next decade and a half. When Harris entered the privacy booth that day, she saw one of Mercer County’s then-new touchscreen voting machines facing her, a model called the Sequoia AVC Advantage. She found her candidate of choice on the large paper ballot overlay, pressed the box next to the candidate’s name and then hit a large button at the bottom right of the machine to cast her vote. Typically, at this point, the AVC Advantage will make a noise to indicate a vote has been counted. For Harris, nothing happened. Harris exited the privacy booth slightly confused. A poll worker stopped her, and said her vote didn’t register and that she should try again. Harris did, four times with the same results. After the fifth time, the poll worker shrugged, and said, “Well, I think it worked.” Harris never received definitive confirmation her vote had been cast. To this day, she doesn’t know whether the machine recorded her vote. Harris couldn’t shake the feeling that her vote had been taken away. She asked the county for confirmation or at least an explanation. She didn’t get answers, but she did earn a new nickname, courtesy of a county freeholder—“the Incident in Hopewell.” So she sued.

National: What Battleground States Need to Do to Prevent Voting Machine Hacking in 2020 | Hadley Hitson/Fortune

Three companies control the fate of United States elections. Election Systems & Software, Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart InterCivic dominate 92% of the voting machine market, standing to make bank as states rush to update their systems before the looming 2020 election.  In 2016, counties in 16 states used paperless equipment without backup records. The Department of Homeland Security later notified six of those states that hackers targeted their systems. There’s now widespread recognition that paperless machines are the least secure. Some state governments control voting methods, others delegate the decision to local authority, but in most of those states, officials are moving to purchase new machines. “The transition is still happening, but I’m hopeful every battleground state will have a paper backup of every vote,” said Lawrence Norden, director of the Election Reform Program at the NYU Brennan Center For Justice. Norden predicts 90% of votes will have paper backups in 2020.

Georgia: Voters begin casting ballots on new Georgia election system | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The first Georgia voters to test the state’s new voting machines cast their ballots Monday, with some voters in Paulding County praising the addition of a paper ballot and others saying the voting equipment was more cumbersome than what they’re accustomed to using. Election officials rolled out the new voting system in six counties for local elections as in-person early voting began Monday. The $107 million system, which combines touchscreens and computer-printed paper ballots, will be used by all voters statewide on March 24 for the presidential primary. A few minor problems surfaced when polls opened in Paulding, located about 35 miles west of Atlanta.

Alaska: State buying new voting machines for 2020 | Amanda Bohman/Fairbanks Newsminer

The state of Alaska is replacing the voting machines used in Fairbanks and elsewhere starting with the August 2020 state primary election, according to state and borough elections officials. That means Tuesday’s election was the last regular election for the AccuVote machines that have been used here for the past 20 years. The new machines are ImageCast Precinct ballot counters, or ICPs. The voter experience will not change much, officials said. People will continue to vote privately in a booth and then feed their ballot into a machine that tabulates the votes. The process will take a few seconds longer because the new technology captures an image of each ballot, officials said. The city of Valdez has been using the ICP machines for a few years. The clerk said they work well. “We love it. My voters love it. I haven’t had any problems with their equipment at all,” Valdez City Clerk Sheri Pierce said. The machines are made by Dominion Voting Systems, the same company that manufactured the AccuVote machines.

New York: Hacking concerns delayed vote machines: Westchester bought them anyway | Mark Lungariello/Rockland/Westchester Journal News

Westchester County lawmakers put off buying new voting machines in March over concerns they could be hacked and made to add marks on finished ballots. The county Board of Elections bought some anyway. “The local county legislature has no authority to approve the machines, so we didn’t do anything out of the ordinary,” Reggie Lafayette, Democratic elections commissioner, told The Journal News/lohud. But some lawmakers didn’t see it that way and even sought a written legal opinion from county staff attorneys on the move. The county Law Department concluded in August that the elections board acted within its authority under New York state law as a semi-autonomous entity. Legislator Nancy Barr, a Rye Brook Democrat, said the process still left a lot to be desired. “Even if it’s allowed, it’s certainly not something that generates trust between the Board of Legislators and the Board of Elections, and other departments,” she said at last Monday’s meeting of the legislature’s Budget and Appropriations Committee.

National: Hacker conference report details persistent vulnerabilities to US voting systems | Maggie Miller/The Hill

U.S. voting systems remain vulnerable to cyberattacks three years after documented efforts to penetrate election machines, according to a report released Thursday. The report is based on the findings of the white-hat hacker DEF CON Voting Village, an annual gathering of hackers that uses election machines to find vulnerabilities that could allow someone to interfere with the voting process. This year’s event allowed hackers to test voting equipment, including e-poll books, optical scan paper voting devices and direct recording electronic voting machines — all certified for use in at least one U.S. voting jurisdiction. “Voting Village participants were able to find new ways, or replicate previously published methods, of compromising every one of the devices in the room in ways that could alter stored vote tallies, change ballots displayed to voters, or alter the internal software that controls the machines,” the report said. Despite the “disturbing” findings of the report, the authors wrote that the findings were “not surprising,” particularly in light of the fact that many of the election equipment cyber vulnerabilities found were “reported almost a decade earlier.” Equipment that was tested included those made by leading voting machines companies Election Systems and Software (ES&S) and Dominion Systems.

Georgia: Under Court Order, Georgia Rolls Out New Voting System | Daniel Jackson/Courthouse News

The plastic film protecting the screens of four tablets used to mark ballots were not yet peeled off, though they were growing dog-eared on the edges, when residents of Catoosa County became some of the first voters in the state to test Georgia’s new voting machines. About 50 residents of Catoosa County sipped on fruit punch in the building that houses the Catoosa County Elections & Voter Registration Department Monday evening. In a few moments, they were about to cast ballots in a demonstration election that asked questions such as the name of Georgia’s state bird (the brown thrasher). Georgia announced in July that it had chosen a new method of conducting elections after a contentious 2018 gubernatorial election left voting rights activists questioning the integrity of the state’s voting system. A ballot-marking system that allows voters to fill out their votes on a screen, which prints out a ballot, which the voter then feeds into a scanner produced by Dominion Voting Systems was the winning bid, costing the state $107 million. Most Georgia voters will continue to use the old system, which records votes digitally, one last time in November elections this year. Catoosa County, a short drive from the Tennessee city of Chattanooga, is one of six counties piloting the new system, which include Carroll, Bartow, Decatur, Paulding and Lowndes counties. It’s a voting system that, according to its critics, failed to solve the problems of the old voting system.

Louisiana: Early voting errors prompt paper ballots | Robb Hays/WAFB

A small number of errors with Louisiana’s early voting machines has led to some voters having to use a paper ballot, election officials said Tuesday, Oct. 1. Louisiana Secretary of State spokesman Tyler Brey says, as of late Tuesday afternoon, the error has only occurred 20 times among the nearly 120,000 votes cast statewide thus far. At least one of the errors occurred with an early voting machine at the Coursey Boulevard location in Baton Rouge. In that case, the machine displayed an error message after the voter had made his selections for all races and tried to submit his ballot, that voter reported. Brey says the paper ballots are counted on election night after being verified by the Board of Elections Supervisors in each parish.

National: Voting machine companies may throw their doors open to ethical hackers | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Voting machine companies, which for years have been loath to acknowledge any security weaknesses, are finally saying they will consider allowing ethical hackers to search for them. But hackers are skeptical of the election industry’s recent commitment to security and transparency. The olive branch to hackers marks a huge about-face for the industry, which last week asked for feedback from researchers and companies about the best ways to let outsiders vet their security. They’ve long argued that researchers, by exposing security flaws, could give a roadmap to foreign hackers intent on compromising the 2020 contest. Now they’re saying the threat of Russian hacking and disinformation is too severe for the security of election systems to be treated as a private matter to be managed behind closed doors. “For many years the industry…preferred to work quietly behind scenes. [But] 2016 brought cybersecurity to the front burner and folks in this industry who were uncomfortable talking about vulnerabilities have warmed up to it,” Chris Wlaschin, the top cybersecurity official for Election Systems and Software, told me. But some ethical hackers worry the industry, which has historically prioritized making their machines easier for election administrators to use rather than making them as secure as possible, isn’t ready to make big changes. They fear the companies won’t work quickly enough to fix the bugs they discover and could use non-disclosure agreements to enforce silence about dangerous bugs that could compromise an election.

Colorado: Colorado the First State to Remove Bar Codes from Ballots | Andrew Westrope/Government Technology

Since learning the scope of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, state and federal officials have been vocal about the need to secure America’s next elections. For many jurisdictions, that might mean less technology rather than more, and resisting pressure from voting-tech vendors to buy expensive solutions where pen and paper is more secure. This week, Colorado took the lead as the first state to require all ballots to be tabulated using only the marked ovals, as opposed to QR (quick response) codes, or bar codes in which the voter’s choices are encoded. According to a news release from Secretary of State Jena Griswold, the use of ballot-marking devices had created a situation in which votes tabulated by QR codes could not be verified by the human eye. Serena Woods, a spokeswoman for Griswold’s office, explained that while Colorado’s in-person voters would get a printed out summary of their choices, they couldn’t verify that the QR code accurately reflected those. While there had been no specific incidents of QR codes being tampered with, Woods said, a nefarious actor could theoretically program a tabulation machine to misread QR codes, or reprogram ballot-marking devices to print inaccurate codes.

Louisiana: New Louisiana election, same old voting machines | Melinda DeSlatte/Associated Press

Despite a national uproar over election security, Louisiana voters will be casting their ballots next month in a statewide election on the same type of paperless voting machines the state has used since 2005. No changes are expected for the 2020 presidential election either. Allegations of improper bid handling derailed plans to replace to Louisiana’s voting machines, so the secretary of state’s office had to redo its vendor search process. The agency still is drafting the solicitation for bid proposals, so new voting machines aren’t coming soon. Still, Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin said voters should feel confident in the machines they will use to cast their ballots in the Oct. 12 and Nov. 16 elections for Louisiana governor, six other statewide positions and state legislative seats.

Georgia: State gets new election machines, but paper ballots abound | Mark Niesse and Arielle Kass/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The 2,271 people eligible to vote in Chattahoochee Hills may feel like they’re stepping back in time whenever they cast a ballot for the City Council or mayor. In much of the rest of the state, electronic voting machines are standard for each and every election. But in Chattahoochee Hills and about 70 other cities, residents vote using paper ballots. In many of those cities, the votes are even tallied by hand.On election night in Chattahoochee Hills, residents can pile into City Hall to watch City Clerk Dana Wicher and a handful of poll workers open a locked metal ballot box and call out the names on each ballot. Like keeping score at a baseball game, they can even tally along.As the debate rages over whether Georgia’s new touchscreen-and-printed-ballot voting system is secure, voters in cities across the state will continue to fill out their ballots with pens this November. They won’t use any modern technology during their municipal elections. State law exempts cities from having to use the uniform voting system mandated for county, state and federal elections.“Folks like coming in and doing the paper ballots. It’s that old-town community feeling,” Wicher said. “There is some suspense. There’s probably more transparency with the paper system.”

Pennsylvania: Allegheny County to ‘stress test’ prospective voting systems | Jamie Martines /Tribune-Review

The Allegheny County Board of Elections committee in charge of searching for a new voting system decided Friday to spend the next month working with vendors to test prospective systems, seeking confirmation that they can handle the high volume of complex contests in the county. A report submitted Aug. 19 by the Voting System Search Committee and discussed Friday indicates that only one of four vendors under consideration has the state and federal certification guaranteeing it can meet the county’s needs. The committee is comprised of officials from the county elections, law, purchasing, computer services, budget and finance, human resources, county manager and administrative services departments. “I was surprised too,” said board chair and Allegheny County Councilman Thomas Baker, R-Ross. “I thought we would have a couple options that were viable that we would be able to pick from. I’m learning at the same pace that you’re all learning. I had no sense, as chairman, what would be in the report.” The voting system’s software must be robust enough to handle up to 4,000 separate ballot styles during a municipal primary election, according to the report. That means a system must be able to support an election involving as many as 10,000 candidate positions and 7,000 contests across the county’s 130 municipalities and 43 school districts.

Pennsylvania: Election security, transparency and millions of dollars: Questions answered as Allegheny County looks to buy new voting machines. | J. Dale Shoemaker/PublicSource

If you’ve tuned into the news at any point over the past three years, chances are you’ve heard that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 presidential election. Russian interference, “in sweeping and systematic fashion,” was a key — and much publicized — finding of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to the U.S. Attorney General earlier this year. But a less prominent finding was that Russia’s meddling also targeted state and county officials in an attempt to access voter rolls and voting systems. According to Mueller, Russia successfully accessed voter rolls in Illinois and even hacked one of the companies that sells election equipment to states and counties. The potential for future attacks, particularly during the 2020 presidential election, has worried some elections experts and advocates in Allegheny County and beyond. But now, as Allegheny County and many other Pennsylvania counties are in the process of buying new voting machines, there is an opportunity to select equipment that will maintain integrity at the polls. The state government, as part of a lawsuit settlement, has directed all counties to implement a voting system with a paper trail by the 2020 primaries. By 2022, counties must have a system in place to automatically audit election results to ensure they’re accurate. At present, a search committee comprised of 10 Allegheny County employees has issued a report assessing the cost and security protocols of nine different voting systems from four companies. Some are paper based, some are computer based.

Georgia: Voters raise concerns about new voting system to state board | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Voters told Georgia’s election board Wednesday they’re deeply worried about the security and accuracy of the state’s new voting system and they urged the board to enact strong rules that ensure vote counts are correct.
The Secretary of State’s office announced it has started creating standards for recounts, audits and security of paper ballots that will be printed out by voting machines, which are scheduled to be used by Georgia voters statewide during the March 24 presidential primary.The 10 voters who spoke to the State Election Board, which is responsible for making election rules and investigating violations, said they distrust the $107 million voting system that Georgia bought from Denver-based Dominion this month. They doubted that computer-printed ballots will safeguard elections.“If a voter cannot recall every race and choice, she cannot identify whether the machine printout accurately reflects her intentions, or instead added, dropped or changed one of her choices,” said Rhonda Martin, a Fulton County voter. “No valid audit can be conducted on the basis of unverifiable source documents.”

Georgia: Voters challenge legality of new election system | Kate Brumback/Associated Press

Georgia voters who want hand-marked paper ballots are challenging the new election system state officials are rushing to implement in time for next year’s presidential primaries, saying the new touchscreen machines remain vulnerable and their results unverifiable, even though they produce paper records. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the state’s purchase of a $106 million election system from Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems last month, with plans to replace the outdated election management system and paperless touchscreen voting machines in use since 2002. He then certified the new system on Aug. 9, and said it will be in place in time for the March 24 primaries. The voters’ petition, seeking a withdrawal of the certification and a re-examination of the Dominion system, was submitted Monday to Raffensperger’s office. It says the system doesn’t meet Georgia’s voting system certification requirements and doesn’t comply with the state election code. Georgia law allows voters to request that the secretary of state “reexamine any such device previously examined and approved by him or her” as long as at least 10 voters sign onto the request. The petition submitted Monday includes signatures of more than 1,450 registered voters from 100 counties, including some elected officials, and was filed by voting integrity advocates and the state Libertarian Party. Additionally, some of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the state’s outdated voting system filed an amended complaint on Friday asking U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg to prohibit the state from using the new Dominion system, calling it “illegal and unreliable.”

Georgia: Lawsuit says new Georgia voting system should be stopped | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Voters who want paper ballots filled out by hand asked a federal judge late Friday to prevent Georgia from using the $107 million voting system the state just bought. The request comes a day after the judge ruled that voters must use some type of paper ballots next year, but her decision didn’t address the legality of the state’s new voting system.Election officials plan to replace Georgia’s 17-year-old electronic voting machines with a system that combines touchscreens with paper ballots. Voters will pick their candidates on a 21.5-inch tablet that’s connected to a ballot printer starting with the March 24 presidential primary.The lawsuit, filed by voters and election integrity advocates, alleges the new voting machines will remain vulnerable to hacking, malware, bugs and misconfiguration.But state election officials have said that paper ballots will ensure the accuracy of results during recounts and audits.In addition, the lawsuit said the printed ballots aren’t truly verifiable. Although voters will be able to review ballots before casting them, the ballots embed voters’ choices in bar codes that are only readable by scanning machines.“No elector can visually review and confirm whether the bar code accurately conveys their intended selections,” according to the amended complaint.

Georgia: Judge Says Georgia To Use Old Electronic Voting Machines For 2019 Elections | Stephen Fowler/NPR

A federal judge has denied a request to move all of this fall’s municipal elections in Georgia away from “unsecure, unreliable and grossly outdated technology” and toward hand-marked paper ballots that are optically scanned and counted. The order from U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg Thursday also requires the state to cease using its direct-recording electronic voting machines after 2019 and expresses doubts about the state’s ability to roll out its new ballot-marking device system in time for the March 24, 2020, presidential primary election. In the decision, Totenberg also directs the Georgia secretary of state’s office to develop a plan to “address errors and discrepancies in the voter registration database” and have paper copies of poll books at each voting precinct. The state must also create a contingency plan for the 2020 elections in case the new system is not completely rolled out. That includes designating several pilot jurisdictions that will use hand-marked paper ballots with optical scanners in their elections this fall. A group of election integrity advocates and Georgia voters sued the secretary of state’s office in 2017 alleging that the current DRE system is not secure and is vulnerable to hacking. Last year, Totenberg denied a similar motion for preliminary injunction that would have blocked the DREs from being used in the 2018 midterm election. The current motion sought to prevent the machines from being used this fall in several hundred local elections.

Georgia: Judge denies paper ballots in Georgia this year but requires them in 2020 | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A federal judge ruled Thursday that Georgia voters can cast ballots on the state’s “unsecure, unreliable and grossly outdated” electronic voting machines one last time, deciding it would be too disruptive to switch to paper ballots before this fall’s elections. But starting with next year’s presidential primary election, paper ballots will be required, according to the ruling by U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg. Her order barred the state from using its current electronic voting machines after this year’s elections.Election officials are already planning to upgrade the state’s voting system by buying $107 million in new equipment that will use a combination of touchscreens and printed-out paper ballots to check the accuracy of election results.If the state’s new voting system isn’t completely rolled out to all 159 counties in time for the March 24 presidential primary, Totenberg ruled that voters must use paper ballots filled out by hand. “Georgia’s current voting equipment, software, election and voter databases are antiquated, seriously flawed and vulnerable to failure, breach, contamination and attack,” Totenberg wrote. Totenberg wrote it would be “unwise” to immediately discard the state’s 17-year-old voting machines, which lack paper ballots that could be used to check the accuracy of election results. She wrote that it could be “a recipe for disaster” to force resistant election officials to switch to hand-marked paper ballots this year while they’re also transitioning to the state’s new voting system. Her 153-page ruling clears the way for 386 local elections to move forward as planned this fall, including votes for the Atlanta school board, the Fulton County Commission and city councils across the state.

National: Voting machine companies balk at taking part in hacking event | Kevin Collier/CNN

At the country’s biggest election security bonanza, the US government is happy to let hackers try to break into its equipment. The private companies that make the machines America votes on, not so much. The Def Con Voting Village, a now-annual event at the US’s largest hacking conference, gives hackers free rein to try to break into a wide variety of decommissioned election equipment, some of which is still in use today. As in the previous two years, they found a host of new flaws. The hunt for vulnerabilities in US election systems has underscored tensions between the Voting Village organizers, who argue that it’s a valuable exercise, and the manufacturers of voting equipment, who didn’t have a formal presence at the convention. Supporters of the Voting Village say it’s the best way draw attention to problems with an industry that otherwise doesn’t face much public accountability, even in the wake of Russia’s foreign interference in the 2016 election. Their work has attracted the notice of several lawmakers, who are calling for new legislation to strengthen the integrity of US elections.

Georgia: Test results for Georgia new voting system released | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia’s new voting system passed equipment tests by a company hired to evaluate it for the state. The certification test results, released Monday, indicated that touchscreens, election computers, ballot scanners and other machinery can handle the stresses of an election.The tests identified one issue, when a ballot scanner suffered a “memory lockup” after reading 4,500 ballots. The problem was resolved by restarting the scanner.The testing by Pro V&V evaluated the voting equipment’s functionality. It didn’t grade the security of the $107 million voting system by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems. Starting with the presidential primary on March 24, all Georgia voters will use touchscreens attached to printers that produce paper ballots. Voters will then be able to review their ballots before inserting them into optical scanners for tabulation. Ballots will be stored for audits and recounts. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger issued his certification that the Dominion system is reliable and accurate on Friday after receiving the Pro V&V test results.