Georgia voting software will not be updated until after 2024 despite vulnerabilities

Georgia election officials will not be updating the state’s voting software until after the 2024 elections despite known vulnerabilities existing in the software, according to a report that was unsealed on Wednesday.

A lawyer for Georgia GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recently told a federal court that officials would not install security patches on Dominion Voting machines until after the 2024 presidential election. Weaknesses in Dominion’s machines have been verified by federal cybersecurity officials who have recommended that states using the software upgrade their systems.

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“Upgrading the system will be a massive undertaking, and our election officials are evaluating the scope of, and time required for the project,” Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, told CNN.

State officials minimized the risks found in the report that was unsealed on Wednesday, which was written two years ago.

“It’s extremely unlikely that any bad actor would be able to exploit our voting systems in the real world. The system is secure,” Raffensperger’s chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, said in a statement Wednesday. “The procedural safeguards we have in place mitigate these hypothetical scenarios from happening.”

The report highlighted six attack scenarios that showed alleged weaknesses in the machine’s voting security. But a separate report by Dominion and Mitre Corp., a not-for-profit research lab, countered the initial report and found that five of the attack scenarios were “non-scalable.” This meant they would “impact a statistically insignificant number of votes on a single device at a time.”

Dominion upgraded its security software in Michigan last year in response to the report, which was written by University of Michigan computer scientist Alex Halderman, who slammed Georgia for not following suit.

“[Delaying] is worse than doing nothing,” Halderman said. “It puts would-be adversaries on notice that the state will conduct the presidential election with this particular version of software with known vulnerabilities, giving them nearly 18 months to prepare and deploy attacks.”

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The decision to delay updating the system comes as Dominion voting machines have been at the center of controversy since the 2020 presidential election, in which former President Donald Trump alleged widespread voter fraud had occurred in Georgia. An investigation into Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the election is currently being conducted in Fulton County.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has asked judges to refrain from in-person hearings for parts of August. It is the latest indication that the public can expect charges related to efforts to overturn the election results to drop sometime this summer.