Raffensperger: Update to MITRE Report

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger released the following statement after the public release of MITRE’s Independent Technical Review: Security Analysis of Georgia’s ImageCast X Ballot Marking Devices. See the full MITRE report below.

“The MITRE report confirms that Georgia’s election infrastructure is secured by the toughest safeguards. For years, election deniers have created a cottage industry of ever-shifting claims about conspiracies to change votes, steal elections, and undermine voter confidence. This report says it all: voting machines do not flip votes. Cast ballots are counted as the voter intended. Georgia elections are secure.”

Dominion Voting Systems retained MITRE’s National Election Security Lab to provide an independent review of various claims made by a researcher hired by the plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to prohibit the use of electronic voting machines. The plaintiffs sought the removal of the previous DRE system used in Georgia until 2019, and now seek to ban the replacement system. Numerous political candidates have supported the unfounded claims in the lawsuit and have pushed to deploy the exclusive use of hand-marked paper ballots, a practice not used in Georgia since the last century.

The plaintiff’s researcher alleged six potential attacks against our state’s voting machines that were discovered once provided with three months of unlimited access to Georgia’s voting systems. In their review, MITRE found “five of six attacks were…non-scalable, impacting a statistically insignificant number of votes on a single device at a time. One attack was technically scalable but also…infeasible due to access controls in place in operational election environments, access required to Dominion election software, and access required to Dominion election hardware.”

“The risks outlined in the researcher’s report are theoretical and imaginary,” said Raffensperger. “Our security measures are real and mitigate all of them.”

“It should be obvious that with three months of completely unlimited, completely unrestricted access to any system in a laboratory environment, smart people can create hypothetical situations showing theoretical manipulation of those systems,” said Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling. “The procedural safeguards we have in place mitigate these hypothetical scenarios from happening. It’s extremely unlikely that any bad actor would be able to exploit our voting systems in the real world. The system is secure.”