CAPITOL HILL POLITICS (Washington Insider Magazine) -According to a draught assessment evaluated by CNN, federal cybersecurity officials have confirmed there are software design flaws in specific Dominion Voting Systems ballot-marking machines found during a contentious Georgia court case, which could theoretically allow a malevolent actor to interfere with the devices.
According to the report from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the flaws have never been abused in an election, and doing so may require physical accessibility to voting machines or other unusual conditions that routine election security standards preclude.
Local, state, and federal authorities are girding for election skeptics to try to weaponize reports of the security flaws ahead of the midterm elections, according to CNN, because the matter is Dominion voting machine, which has become the focus of conspiracy theorists who inaccurately claim there was large-scale scam in the 2020 election.
CISA added a new entry to its “Rumor Control” webpage, which it used to refute charges of electoral fraud during the 2020 election, in preparation for the publication of the software flaws.
According to the CISA alert, the vulnerabilities impact a type of Dominion ballot-marking equipment known as the Democracy Suite ImageCast X that is only utilized in a few states.
The CISA research is based on a security examination of Dominion Voting Systems’ ballot-marking machines conducted at the request of plaintiffs in a long-running case against Georgia’s Secretary of State by a University of Michigan computer scientist.
J. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist, was granted accessibility to the Dominion ballot-marking machines over several weeks, which print out a vote after voters make their choices on a touch screen.
The court has yet to release Halderman’s report.
However, according to Halderman and others who have reviewed the research, it purports to show how software faults may be used to change QR codes produced by ballot-marking machines, causing those codes to differ from the voter’s vote. Post-election inspections that compare paper trails to votes registered on machines may uncover the disparity.
Because of the nature of technology, every software, including election software, has weaknesses if one examines closely enough. Physical access constraints as well as other layers of defense, and also post-election audits, according to election experts, help limit the potential of hacking affecting votes.
The majority of jurisdictions utilizing the machines evaluated, according to the CISA alert, have already implemented the mitigations advised by the agency. According to one source knowledgeable on the situation, Dominion has updated equipment to fix the vulnerability.
Separately, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office issued a statement on Friday regarding a Mitre Corp., a federally sponsored nonprofit, examination of the state’s election systems. While the Mitre assessment has not been publicly disclosed, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, Gabriel Sterling, said in a statement on Friday that the report demonstrated that existing procedural controls make it exceedingly impossible for any negative actor to exploit any weaknesses.
