Expert Testifies in Court: Dominion Voting Systems Easily Hackable

From Newsmax.com (Jan. 23):

A voting systems expert testifying in a Georgia trial last week demonstrated that Dominion Voting Systems machines were so easily hackable he could use a Bic pen and smart card to copy, edit, and change votes in seconds, according to Law360 Pulse, which is covering the trial.

Professor J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan, the author of a highly publicized report detailing deficiencies in Dominion's voting machines, testified at an Atlanta trial Thursday in a case filed in 2017 against the state of Georgia.

The suit was originally filed by the Coalition for Good Governance, a liberal activist group, which claimed the state's use of voting machines which include touch-screen computers to cast ballots without the benefit of a verifiable print ballot, made the voting counts susceptible to manipulation.

After the suit, Georgia election officials changed their voting vendor in 2020 to Dominion Voting Systems, which also used a touch-screen ballot but provided voters with a paper ballot containing a QR code containing their vote information.

The Good Governance suit, however, asked a federal judge to order Georgia to stop using Dominion since they claimed their machines remain vulnerable to attack.

The suit also claimed the Dominion machines offer voters a paper QR code that cannot easily be read to verify the accuracy of their vote.

Halderman, who wrote a 96-page report in July 2021, began his demonstration before U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg in Atlanta by asking a plaintiffs' attorney to borrow a pen, Law360 Pulse reported.

The professor then inserted the pen into the Dominion voting machine and held it there for a few seconds, which caused the machine to reboot into "safe mode," according to Halderman.

Halderman then explained that a person could copy or change files on the voting machine, change its operating settings, or install malware.

Halderman said accessing the "terminal emulator" could allow a user to bypass the computer's normal security settings and obtain "super-user" access — something that allows a person to read, monitor, and change "anything," including ballots, on the voting machine with "no limits," Law360 Pulse reported. [read more]

Doesn't sound good. Dominion should probably fix the hack. A ball point pen? It would be a very good idea to fix the hack.