Fayette County voters, like those throughout Georgia, will cast their next ballots on the state’s new Dominion voting machines.
The first step of the voting process will be to provide the poll worker with a photo ID which will be inserted into the poll pad computer, followed by the voter reviewing the information and signing to approve the information.
From there, the ID will be returned and a voter card given to the voter.
At the voting machine, the voting card will be inserted and the ballot will be cast using the touchscreen. Once completed, the voter will print a hard copy of the ballot and review it.
Once reviewed and the voting card removed, the voter will take the ballot to a scanner where ballot hard copy will be inserted and the ballot will be cast.
To view the video instructions for the new voting machines visit the Fayette County Elections page at https://fayettecountyga.gov/elections/index.htm
Community meetings to display and discuss the new Dominion voting machines will be held Feb. 20 from 6-8 p.m. at North Fayette Elementary School located at 609 Kenwood Road and on March 14 from 9-10:30 a.m. by the Fayette County Democratic Party at the IHOP, located at 705 North Jeff Davis Drive in Fayetteville.
Dominion Voting Systems election software was implemented in all of Georgia’s counties for the first time this year.
“Georgia’s new electronic voting system is vulnerable to cyberattacks that could undermine public confidence, create chaos at the polls or even manipulate the results on Election Day,” reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) in October.
The report added that computer scientists, voting-rights activists, U.S. intelligence agencies and a federal judge have continuously warned of security deficiencies in Georgia’s system, but state officials have dismissed their concerns.
An investigation by AJC also determined that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office weakened the system’s defenses by disabling password protections on a key component that controls who is allowed to vote.
The report continued:
Officials tell voters to verify their selections on a paper ballot before feeding it into an optical scanner. But the scanner doesn’t record the text that voters see; rather, it reads an unencrypted quick response, or QR, barcode that is indecipherable to the human eye. Either by tampering with individual voting machines or by infiltrating the state’s central elections server, hackers could systematically alter the barcodes to change votes.
Such a manipulation could not be detected without an audit after the election.
The new voting system “presents serious security vulnerability and operational issues” caused by “fundamental deficits and exposure,” U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg wrote in a recent order, in which she criticized state officials for not taking the problems more seriously.
“These risks,” Totenberg wrote, “are neither hypothetical nor remote under the current circumstances.”
The report added that Texas rejected Dominion Voting Systems, saying its inspectors encountered “multiple hardware issues” and could not certify that it was “safe from fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation.”
Dominion disagrees with these findings, stating that multiple large local governments across the country — such Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, and San Francisco and San Diego counties in California — have purchased their system.
At least Al Capone endorsed the system.