Questions raised about Dominion voting machines finally got the best form of sunlight today – sworn testimony in open court subject to cross-examination.
Election security experts Clay Parikh and Ben Cotton testified in Fulton County (Atlanta) Superior Court today. They testified that they were able to identify the master encryption passwords stored in plain text and unsecured on the databases housed in Dominion voting machines. They further testified that basic security protocols call for these passwords to be kept separate and secret so that only authorized persons can access them.
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This information was turned over to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in March 2024 at the latest, according to the lawyers at the hearing.
The allegations, if true, are explosive and have deep ramifications going back years. Many claims of election voting machine issues have been either overstated or outright fabricated, which has done much to discredit any legitimate attempts to increase election confidence.
In fact, the left likely wants the right to make overstated or incorrect claims regarding election integrity. It provides them a weapon to use when legitimate questions are raised. It has the added bonus of likely suppressing voter turnout on the right by dampening enthusiasm.
That does not mean our election processes are above scrutiny, however. And today, two experts raised legitimate questions that deserve answers.
Is it true that, most explosively, the master encryption key for all the machines is contained in plain text visible to anyone with access to the machines?
Amazingly, despite this claim having been in the public domain since at least April, there has been no response, let alone an actual hearing, from anyone in any governmental agency on whether these allegations have any merit that I could find with web searches.
But surely Georgia, with its Republican Governor Brian Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, would provide us with reassurances that this is not the case or that they are seeking to make sure it is not the case?
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Instead, lawyers for Raffensperger came into court fighting the issuance of an order to ensure that this is not the case. And instead of fighting it with facts disproving the allegations, Raffensperger is relying on non-factual defenses.
The plaintiffs filed this case too late, he says. They filed in the wrong court, he says. They lack standing, he says.
Nowhere does he say, “It is not true that the master key is contained in plain sight on the machines’ databases.”
Instead, the lawyers used a very lawyerly trick in their filings with the court. I need to quote it to give it full context:
The claims in the Application are not new—they are the same discredited conspiracy theories about Georgia’s voting system that have repeatedly been raised and rejected by courts. The so-called ‘experts’ relied upon by Applicant in support of their claims have made other claims about the same voting system used by Georgia that have been rejected as frivolous, and not only have courts dismissed them, but one federal court held that Rule 11 sanctions were appropriate.
(The filing then cites as support the recent Arizona case of Lake v. Hobbs, F.Supp.3 1015.)
That passage, the only passage in their 23-page filed response that even attempts to deal with the factual allegations, is trying to make it sound like the allegations have been reviewed, when they have not. This needs to be parsed one phrase at a time:
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“The claims in the Application are not new […]”
While this is technically true – one of the lawyers on this case attempted to insert it into another different case at a late stage and was denied the opportunity to do so – the claims are new to being reviewed on their own for whether they are true or not by a trial court.
“[The claims] are the same discredited conspiracy theories about Georgia’s voting system that have repeatedly been raised and rejected by courts […]”
This borders on a misrepresentation to the court, as this is decidedly not the same as prior claims that have been made about Dominion voting systems. For years, claims have been made that Dominion voting systems are insecure. Those claims have typically focused on such things as, to quote the very case Raffensperger cited above, “operating systems and antivirus software that lack necessary updates; open ports on the election management server, which allow for possible remote access; shared accounts and common passwords; unauthorized user internet or cellular access through election servers and devices; and secret content not subject to objective and public analysis.” None of the prior trial court cases had these allegations before it. For purposes of court proceedings, this is a new allegation.
“The so-called ‘experts’ relied upon by Applicant in support of their claims…”
Attempts to undermine Parikh’s and Cotton’s expertise with cheap adjectives failed. The trial judge today qualified both Parikh and Cotton as experts in their field, as they have been qualified before. This unsupported insinuation by Raffensperger’s attorneys – which lacked any evidence to support it today in court – now looks even worse. They are not “so-called ‘experts’”. They are experts.
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“[Parikh and Cotton] have made other claims about the same voting system used by Georgia that have been rejected as frivolous, and not only have courts dismissed them, but one federal court held that Rule 11 sanctions were appropriate.”
This is the most lawyerly of the lawyerly deceptions. That court case that Raffensperger’s attorneys cite did not have these factual allegations before it. Also, that court made a procedural dismissal. It made no assessment of the truth of any election integrity allegations.
So, these allegations have been made by court-certified experts under penalty of perjury, after they turned over the sourcing for their findings, and all a Republican state politician can respond with is procedural defenses?
In normal litigation, parties always make their procedural defenses first. But this is election integrity in Georgia, one of the most highly watched and divisive issues in our country. That is not worthy of a Republican administration directly responding? Why not more transparency? Why is it taking a local county Republican chapter to litigate this? Why did cross-examination not even contest the truth of the allegations?
The trial judge said today he will likely issue a ruling on the directed verdict request by Rafffensperger “by the end of the week.” That judge, like every other judge that faces election integrity suits, has ways to dismiss the case procedurally if he wants to avoid a hot-button issue. That may be likely in this case, as this is the same judge – Scott McAfee – who presided over the hearing to disqualify Fani Willis for hiring her lover as the prosecutor of the Trump RICO case. He issued a very middle-of-the-road opinion in that case, ordering her or Wade removed from the case but refusing to dismiss it, and still faced a far-left challenger in his re-election bid. He knows people are watching. (The YouTube stream of today’s hearing, which may be viewed below, had over a thousand viewers throughout.)
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If the judge refuses to bail out Brad Raffensperger, though, things could get very interesting.