Georgia to buy $100 million Unverifiable Voting System
Bait & Switch SOS Video Fools Media, Civic Groups

ATLANTA, GA – Secretary of State (SOS) Brad Raffensperger announced Monday his office will replace its current unverifiable electronic voting system with another type of unverifiable system. Voters using the chosen Image Cast (ICX) ballot marking device (BMD) from Dominion Voting Systems’ $106 million bid will employ touchscreens to print only their selections on a piece of paper. The voter will slide the paper into a scanner that accumulates votes embedded in a bar code. Although text selections are visible, voters cannot read or verify the actual votes that are accumulated. They also cannot see a full paper ballot with referendum language and unselected candidates.

To conceal these facts from voters, the SOS office used a bait and switch technique by posting a video demonstration of a BMD it claimed to be the current ICX system. The video showed a BMD producing a full ballot with alignment marks instead of bar codes. However, the system in the video is not proposed for Georgia, is not certified and is not known to be installed in other states. VoterGA found the real Dominion ICX system being purchased in an entirely different Dominion demonstration video on You Tube.

BMD voter verifiability was not evaluated for the four vendors submitting bids. Clear Ballot’s Clear Access, part of the Smartmatic bid, prints a full ballot with no bar code. Hart Intercivic’s Duo also prints a full ballot with no votes in their bar code. Clear Ballot’s bid was more expensive while the Hart bid was rejected for being minutes late. Hart’s bid was delayed due to poor response time of the archaic Georgia bid system that takes hours to accept a complete bid. Evaluators were unaware of Hart’s submission.

Claims that a small fraction of paper selections can be suitably audited have already been rejected by experts who concluded BMD systems are unsecure and not auditable. The National Academy of Sciences confirmed that paper selections only “…are virtually unusable for verifying voter intent”. Prof. Phillip Stark, inventor of the risk limiting audits Georgia expects to adopt, wrote Georgia legislators that BMD audits are “meaningless”. He explained there is no directly created voter source document and voters are unduly burdened with verifying whether or not a BMD functioned correctly.

The new voting system is slated to be used during the 2020 Presidential Preference Primary but it does not seem capable of placing all Democratic Presidential candidates together on a single screen without scrolling. The apparent ICX limitation of 11 candidates is less than half the roughly two dozen that are expected to be on the ballot.