VoterGA, a nonprofit election integrity organization, spoke out against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s request for more taxpayer funds from the Georgia Legislature to implement an audit of Georgia’s QR-coded Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5 voting system.
On Monday, Raffensperger (pictured above, right) called on the Georgia State Senate to “agree to funding for new technology approved by the House that would give election officials the ability to audit the text of every choice on every ballot, in every contest – without the use of QR codes.”
Raffensperger acknowledged opposition from groups such as VoterGA that have called for the state to unplug its Dominion Voting System before the 2024 election, saying such a request would be “physically impossible,” adding that it would “require six to nine months to change operating systems and software on tens of thousands of pieces of equipment.”
We need publicly available ballots, not a fake audit#Elections2024 #ElectionIntegrity #Georgia #SaveAmerica pic.twitter.com/xakeGZagwz
— Garland Favorito (@VoterGa) February 21, 2024
VoterGA pushed back on Raffensperger’s request, saying such an audit would not count any ballots marked and cast by voters in any election but instead only count electronic ballot images produced by the Dominion voting system.
The group said ballot images are not usable for auditing because they are “vulnerable to hacking and malware.”
“Any voting system audit must begin with an independent paper trail directly created by the voter. That paper trail is a ballot,” VoterGA co-founder Garland Favorito (pictured above, right) said in a statement. “In November of 2018 when he was running for the office, we warned Mr. Raffensperger to avoid unverifiable QR coded voting systems. After forcing taxpayers to spend $150 million, a U.S. District Court in Curling v. Raffensperger found Georgia’s voting system is unverifiable to the voter and in violation of two Georgia statutes. Trying to convince the legislature to implement a fake audit process while fighting to prevent ballots from being subject to Open Records Requests is an indefensible position.”
In regards to the 2024 election, VoterGA is advocating for the passage of Senate Bill 122 and House Bill 426 in the Georgia Legislature, which “seek to improve security and transparency in the balloting process by making the actual physical ballots subject to Open Records Requests after results certification.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Georgia Star News and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Garland Favorito” by Garland Favorito.
