A cybersecurity expert testified Monday that Georgia’s election system is vulnerable to attacks that could jeopardize the integrity of the November election.
Lawyers for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rejected the testimony as the same “tired old claims” that have been rejected by other courts all over the country.
The arguments came during trial in a lawsuit filed last month by the DeKalb County Republican Party. The party argues that encryption keys that protect passwords and other information for Georgia’s Dominion Voting System machines were revealed and readable in election databases released by four Georgia counties in response to records requests.
Clay Parikh, a cybersecurity expert hired by the party, reviewed the databases, which are snapshots of the counties’ databases following the 2020 election. Not only could he access the encryption keys, but he found identical passwords used in other states with Dominion machines. He said that could allow someone who gained access to one Dominion system to get access to others.
Parikh called security for the system egregious and said it could allow hackers to access the system and change the results of the 2024 election and not be detected.
The potential exposure of encryption keys was first revealed in a report by another cybersecurity expert released in court records last year.
Raffensperger has repeatedly dismissed concerns about the security of the Dominion machines. He has said the vulnerabilities detailed in last year’s report can be exploited under laboratory conditions but not in real-world conditions. One report found the likelihood of such a report to be remote.
The GOP lawsuit, filed in Fulton County Superior Court, says the Dominion system does not meet federal security standards and asks Judge Scott McAfee to order Raffensperger to take steps to meet those standards.
In court documents and in arguments Monday, Raffensperger’s lawyers said the state’s system has been certified by a federal agency and by Raffensperger himself, as required by law. They said the GOP’s claims have been dismissed in other courts across the country. And they said the latest lawsuit is a last-minute attempt to cast doubt on the integrity of elections.
Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have claimed Dominion machines “flipped” votes from Trump to Democrat Joe Biden to steal the 2020 presidential election. No evidence for the claim has come to light, and Biden’s victory was confirmed by a hand count of every ballot cast.
Dominion has sued numerous parties for defamation for spreading the claim. Fox News agreed to pay $787 million to settle one lawsuit.
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