Despite contradicting reports, Secretary of State’s Office says GA elections are secure

ATLANTA — A federal court unsealed two reports on Georgia’s elections machines - one showing vulnerabilities, the other disputing all those claims.

The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office told Channel 2′s Richard Elliot that it wanted these reports released.

Few people know Georgia elections better than Gabe Sterling. He’s the chief operating officer in the Secretary of State’s Office.

That office has been embroiled in a voting machine lawsuit for six years and Wednesday, the judge in that case ordered the release of two investigative reports attached to it.

The plaintiff-commissioned Halderman report looked into possible vulnerabilities in the Dominion voting machines.

It in, Halderman wrote that he discovered that the machines “are not sufficiently secured against technical compromise to withstand vote-altering attacks by bad actors who are likely to attack future elections in Georgia.”

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But the second, called the Mitre report, refutes most of what Halderman said, concluding, yes, there are vulnerabilities but they are “operationally infeasible.”

“Actually, we’ve wanted the Mitre report to be unsealed for a while,” Sterling said. “If somebody insists on doing something as a bad actor, it doesn’t matter what the system is. What the Mitre report shows is that one bad actor can’t do something that can be propagated over the entire system.”

Sterling said multiple federal investigations show no one even tried to do anything like that in the 2020 and 2022 elections.

Bottom line, Sterling said, Georgia’s elections are safe and secure and if someone tried to hack the system, they’d catch it.

“We’ve got great, well-run elections in Georgia. We are a model for the country, and we will continue to be so going forward into the 2024 election,” Sterling said.

The Coalition for Good Governance is the plaintiff in this case.

In a statement, its executive director Marlyn Marks called the unsealing of the Halderman report an “important new chapter” in this case and rejects the findings of the Mitre report.

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