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.