Lowndes County Citizens Unite and Petition for Hand-Marked Paper Ballots Only

We the undersigned, respectfully petition the Lowndes County Board of Elections Supervisor and Board to immediately require the use of hand-marked paper ballots only on security paper and in numerical order in all Georgia elections.

Additionally, we request that the Supervisor and Board consider the following points that support the requirement of secure hand-marked paper ballots and accurate voter assignment O,C.G.A. 21-2-334:

Our concerns regarding the use of the Dominion Tabulators and QR codes are Well-founded in O.C.G.A. 21-2-2(7.1); O.C.G.A. 21.2.300(a) Curling V Raffensperger, 493 F. Supp3d 1264, 1309 (2020). And including the Halderman Report & CISA Report.

The Federal Appeals Court upheld Judge Amy Totenberg’s ruling that said Georgia’s electronic voting system poses a “concrete risk” to secure elections.  The decision from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allows the voting system lawsuit to move forward.  (February 8th, 2019)

U.S. national security agencies, DHS, voting system experts, cybersecurity experts, and the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence agree that paper ballots are required for a secure election.

Georgia uses touchscreen voting machines which cannot be audited, nor can the election results be verified. Georgia's SAFE Commission was tasked with providing a formal legislative recommendation on the type of voting system that should replace the current Diebold DRE voting machines and IGNORED their own appointed expert's recommendation for hand-marked paper ballots with risk limiting audits.

Georgia's SAFE Commission voted against their own experts to recommend another 100% unverifiable, electronic voting system with the ability to disguise all voter intent within a barcode instead of human-readable marks, to replace the current unverifiable voting system.

Hand-marked paper ballots are simple for voters to use and can be rapidly counted by optical scanners.

Georgia officials already use paper ballots and optical scanners for mail-in and provisional ballots and can also use them for polling place ballots in a near seamless transition while saving millions in taxpayer dollars.

The July 7th, 2022 Rasmussen Report:

• 50% of all voters believe widespread cheating will affect the outcome of the November 2022 elections inc. 36% of Dems, 43% of Independents, 71% of GOP & 46% of Black voters.
• Between 52% - 59% - a clear majority of American voters and tested multiple times – maintain that cheating likely affected the outcome of the 2020 national elections.
• 55% of Black voters said there was cheating in the 2020 elections.
  
  

The U.S. District Court found on Oct 11th, 2020 the Dominion Voting System that was used in the November 2020 election is unverifiable to the voter and in violation of two Georgia statues:

There are six sworn affidavits of counterfeit mail-in ballots in Fulton Co. election results scaling into the tens of thousands

• State Farm Arena video shows at least four violations of Georgia election law
• Approximately 43,000 DeKalb Co. drop box ballots have no chain of custody forms to authenticate them
• All 393,000+ original ballot images in Cobb are missing in violation of federal, state retention law
• At least 17,720 certified in person recount votes have no ballot images in Fulton
• 18,325 voters had vacant residential addresses according to U.S. Post Office
• 904 voters were registered at a P.O. Box address, which is illegal
• All or large parts of 2,000,000 original ballot images from 70+ Georgia counties are missing
• Failure to make mandatory check of ballot envelope signature to signature on file resulted in a 2020 absentee ballot rejection rate drop from 3.47% (in 2018) to 0.34%, which translates to the acceptance and inclusion of approximately 4,400 dubious Fulton County mail-in ballots
• The U.S. District Court found Secretary of State’s office “not credible” on August 16th, 2019 [pg. 70]
• A report compiled by Matt Braynard and his team at Look Ahead America provided specific, verifiable evidence that likely illegal ballots exceed the margin of victory in the Presidential race.
• Statistical abnormalities identified in many GA counties by former Army Intelligence Captain, Seth Keschel, show that it is implausible that the election results are correct.
• All 350,000+ original in-person ballot images in Fulton are missing in violation of federal, state retention law

https://voterga.org 

CISA has released an Industrial Controls Systems Advisory (ICSA) detailing vulnerabilities affecting versions of the Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite ImageCast X, which is an in-person voting system used to allow voters to mark their ballot.

Exploitation of these vulnerabilities would require physical access to individual ImageCast X devices, access to the Election Management System (EMS), or the ability to modify files before they are uploaded to ImageCast X devices. Jurisdictions can prevent and/or detect the exploitation of these vulnerabilities by diligently applying the mitigations recommended in ICSA-22-154A, including technical, physical, and operational controls that limit unauthorized access or manipulation of voting systems. Many of these mitigations are already typically standard practice in jurisdictions where these devices are in use and can be enhanced to further guard against exploitation of these vulnerabilities.

https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/ncas/current-activity/2022/06/03/cisa-releases-security-advisory-dominion-voting-systems-democracy 

Dominion Voting Systems use a QR code that violates state law. Rep. Philip Singleton argue in Tuesday’s petition filed in Fulton County Superior Court that the current Dominion Voting Systems ballot marking devices violate state law because voters cannot be certain that the scanned QR codes accurately reflect their votes. https://georgiarecorder.com/brief/suit-backed-by-georgia-lawmaker-challenges-states-ballot-barcode-system/ 

For example in Fulton County, and recently in DeKalb County, there is evidence of vote counting mistakes by the Dominion machines.

Georgia election results cannot ensure accuracy because the new (Ballot Marking Device System (BMD) voting system will tabulate votes hidden in bar codes the voter cannot read or verify.

Georgia counties are not required to audit State Senate, State House, County Commission, Judicial, Non-partisan or Municipal elections and have no plans to do so.

Counties cannot ensure the security of BMD ballots or election files received from the state and nearly all national cybersecurity experts flatly state BMDs are insecure and easily hacked.

Georgia has not stopped the high risk practice of having contractors build electronic ballots at home and transfer them through the public internet to an SOS server as explained in U.S. District court testimony.

The BMDs produce small paper summaries with only selected candidates and no referendum language despite scientific conclusions they are “unauditable” and “virtually useless for verifying voter intent”.

Voter privacy cannot be maintained when the new BMD screens are so large and unprotected that voter selections can be seen from across the room 25 feet away.

State and counties paying $100 million more over 10 years than Hand Marked Paper Ballot and Ballot on Demand systems that experts contend more verifiable, auditable and secure.

Georgia implemented the same Dominion bar coded voting system that the state of Texas rejected and the state of Colorado announced they will ban as of this year.

National Academies of Sciences Report Expert Opinions on HB316 on Electronic Ballot Marking Devices (BMD) Auditability.

1. Dr. Wenke Lee – SAFE Voting Commission Cybersecurity Expert

“Further, many voters cannot detect the discrepancies between votes they have cast with a BMD and errors on the printouts, especially for “down-ballot” races. And some voters do not feel comfortable to speak up if they discover a discrepancy, perhaps because they think such a discrepancy should not have happened so it must be their own fault. Some, wanting to maintain their right to a secret ballot, hesitate to disclose to poll workers who they intended to vote for and the specifics of the error.”

“Therefore, I believe it would be unwise, from a return-of-investment point of view, for the SAFE Commission to recommend that Georgia spend tens of millions of dollars to purchase a new voting system when, compared with the current system, the only major new feature would be paper receipts that cannot even be guaranteed to be valid and cannot be realistically audited.”

2. Recommendations from 24 Computer Scientists:

“A post-election audit requires a valid source document, either marked directly by the voter or voter verified.

Since voter verification of printed ballot summary cards (the source document) is sporadic and unreliable, elections conducted with most ballot marking devices are unauditable.”

https://voterga.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/expert-opinions.pdf 

“Unless a voter takes notes while voting, BMDs that print only selections with abbreviated names/descriptions of the contests are virtually unusable for verifying voter intent.”

4. Prof. Phillip Stark – Inventor of “Risk Limiting Audits”, Election Assistance Commission Advisor

“There are many reasons I share this opinion, but the main issue is security: widespread use of BMDs makes voters responsible for ensuring that BMDs function correctly. However, BMDs do not provide voters a way to demonstrate to pollworkers or election officials that a BMD has malfunctioned, and the available evidence suggests that voters are not able to check BMDs effectively or reliably, as I shall explain. This makes auditing elections that were conducted primarily using BMDs meaningless: an audit could easily confirm an incorrect outcome, because a BMD-generated paper trail is not a trustworthy record of voter intent.”

5. National Election Defense Coalition Letter to SAFE Commission

“If Georgia is to purchase BMDs for all voters this would mean that most voters would be using an expensive electronic device that costs several thousand dollars to perform the same task as a pen.”

“Opponents of hand-marked paper ballots may claim that the voters’ marks vary introducing inconsistencies in vote counting by the scanners. While this may have been a problem fifteen years ago, today’s sophisticated scanners are able to discern voter marks carefully and efficiently flag questionable ballots for adjudication. “

“It typically takes considerably longer for a voter to scroll through a ballot, page by page, to make selections on a BMD than to mark a paper ballot. Additionally, the number of voters that can vote at one time is constrained by the number of BMDs at a polling location, which will increase wait times and lines at polling locations. This serious deficiency of BMDs was demonstrated in Johnson County, Kansas which experienced devastatingly long lines in its 2018 primary after implementing BMDs [1].”