In a recent meeting of the Georgia House Appropriations Committee, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger made a plea for additional funding for the state's voting machines and election systems.
This request comes just a few years after Georgia taxpayers spent $107 million on these systems in 2019.
Raffensperger opened his appeal for more funding for the Elections Division by stating, Since day 1, election security has been my top priority and will continue to be so. He further described Georgias system as battle-tested and claimed that Georgia is a national leader in elections due to being the first state to implement the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 17 days of early voting, which have been called the Gold Standard, and no excuse absentee voting.
However, critics argue that these measures do not necessarily contribute to election security.
Raffensperger's request for Fiscal Year 2025 totals $32.3 million, with nearly two-thirds, or $20.2 million, earmarked for addressing election security issues. He also requested $6 million to replace the aging voting machine power supplies on systems that are less than five years old, and $4,125,000 for QR Code Readers. The current Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) in Georgia print the voters intent in a non-human-verifiable QR Code on the physical paper ballot.
The funding request breakdown reveals that the Software Reinstall applies to all 159 counties and involves 34,000 BMDs and almost 3,800 ballot scanners.
During the hearing, Senator Max Burns questioned Raffensperger about the recent roll-out of Garvis Poll Pads and a discussion at a November committee meeting regarding the poll pads, which Raffensperger did not attend. Burns inquired about the total spent on the Garvis Poll Pads and where that money came from. Raffensperger was unable to provide a total but mentioned the funding was from bond funds redirected.
When asked about the effectiveness of the poll pads, Raffensperger responded that overall, it went very well with a few localized issues. He did not provide a detailed description of or resolution to any of those issues, but instead mentioned a checklist that theyre working on.
Senator Brandon Beach then asked about the nine vulnerabilities in the Halderman Report and Raffenspergers claim that it would cost $32.5 million to fix those vulnerabilities. Beach questioned whether the newly-presented $10 million would be sufficient to fix the machines. Raffensperger responded that the new request was whittled down and may be sharpened even further.
Raffensperger also stated that the implementation of these fixes wont be able to be performed until after the 2024 election, even if more money was allocated, as Beach suggested. He estimated that it would take 97,000 man-hours to update the previously-mentioned 34,000 BMDs, or approximately 2.9 hours per BMD.
In a 2021 report by J Alex Halderman that was recently unsealed by Judge Amy Totenberg in the Curling v. Raffensperger case, Halderman claims that the process of updating the nearly 45,000 pieces of voting equipment and subsequent acceptance testing will require tens of thousands of man-hours. Therefore, the statewide move to 5.17 will occur following the 2024 election cycle.
Halderman also states that some of the critical vulnerabilities he discovered can be at least partially mitigated through changes to the ICXs software. However, he warns that merely patching these specific problems is unlikely to make the ICX substantially more secure.
In addition to the initial cost of $107,000,000, the Georgia Secretary of State is now requesting tens of millions more for security upgrades for a system that still wont be secure and is, in fact, less secure than the old system it replaced, according to the Halderman Report.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's request for additional funding has raised eyebrows among some who believe that Georgians are being asked to pour more of their hard-earned taxpayer dollars into a system of electronic voting machines that remain vulnerable.
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