Dominion voting system computers have been fixtures in Georgia since the 2020 election. But the state election board is getting multidirectional pushback -- from the two political parties, and cybersecurity experts, saying Dominion ballot marking devices shouldn’t be used this fall.
"It's madness, actually, to go into a system and have all of our ballots relying on that," said Jeanne Dufort, chair of the Morgan County Democratic party Monday. She wants the board to switch to hand-marked paper ballots for the November presidential election, while continuing to use Dominion ballot scanners and tabulators to count votes.
Republican Debbie Dooley, an early backer of Donald Trump in 2015, has also asked the election board to replace the state’s computerized voting system with hand-marked paper ballots this fall.
They contend that computer hackers could manipulate elections without a trace. One such warning has come from the founder of Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity, Dr. Rich DeMillo, who talked to 11Alive in 2022.
"If you look at the series of breaches, global breaches of cybersecurity systems over the last two years, it’s story after story like this where some vulnerability in a system was ignored," said DeMillo, who believes eliminating ballot-marking computers would eliminate a hacking threat.
In January 2021, security cameras documented a group of Trump supporters entering the secure area of Coffee County’s election office, where they spent hours copying election software.
"We believe the experts who tell us that bad guys, foreign and domestic, are interested in overturning election results or interfering with them. And we absolutely believe they now have really good tools to do that," Dufort said.
Yet voters admitted to preferring casting votes on computerized devices.
“Computers are fine. I don’t see any problem with the computer voting,” voter William Hill told us in Gwinnett County in 2022.
"I think the system they have right now is really good. I like it. I like it a lot," added Gwinnett County voter Kim Clark.
In 2019, Georgia approved the purchase of 30,000 Dominion ballot marking devices under a $109 million contract. Politicians had staunchly backed the system. But cracks formed after the 2020 presidential election—disputed by Donald Trump—and after the security breach in Coffee County.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been among the most vocal backers of the Dominion system. His office declined a request for comment.
This story has been updated to clarify Dufort's request to discontinue use of the Dominion ballot marking devices, while the state continues to use computerized Dominion systems to tabulate hand-marked paper ballots.