February 1st marked the end of the Curling vs Raffensperger 4 week bench trial conducted by District Federal Court Judge Amy Totenberg. This long running case was started in 2018 to challenge Georgia’s previous electronic voting system provided by Diebold. In an earlier court order, Georgia was required to discontinue the use of the Diebold direct recording equipment which consisted of a touch screen but no verifiable paper audit trail. Since then, Georgia invested $107 million in a new system from Dominion Election Systems which has brought its own controversies with an unreadable proprietary QR code that is utilized to tabulate a voters selections. In fact, Judge Totenberg ruled in an earlier opinion that the system is unverifiable to the voter and violates 2 Georgia statutes. The Federalist has provided a downloadable PDF from each days proceedings which can be found here. So far this Georgia General Assembly Session, there no movement to ditch the Dominion system. The Curling case represents a new hope in relief for Georgians.
Some of the key takeaways from this trial were:
- Dr. Alex J. Halderman flipped votes in a Ballot Marking Device (BMD) with a ball point pen. This is the 2nd time this has occurred in the presence of Judge Totenberg. The first time was 3 years ago and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has not made any attempts to upgrade the software suite even after 4 other Election Assistance Commission (EAC) approved updates have been available.
- Testimony from SOS office staff indicates that no one in the SOS office is in charge of cybersecurity of Georgia’s election system and that this has been outsourced to Dominion.
The following video is from a press conference conducted on February 8, 2024, by Garland Favorito of VoterGA. Ricardo Davis, a co-founder of VoterGA, was also a co-plaintiff in the case and this press conference highlights the key evidence put on the record by his attorney, David Oles. Opening statement, evidence summary and closing presentation slides can be found here on the VoterGA site.