ATLANTA — Fulton County’s election board decided to proceed with software updates to its new voting machines – despite warnings from some tech experts that the updates could create unpredictable issues.
The state has described it as a "routine" software update for the state’s 34,000 new voting machines. Fulton election officials echoed that Thursday.
"We’ve gone through all of the early voting machines" with updates, Fulton elections director Rick Barron said Thursday, though he added some updates were still underway.
"It’s a simple fix," Barron said.
State officials ordered the update after early tests showed that the names of the 20 candidates in the US Senate special election couldn’t fit on one page unless the ballot was changed to show two columns. But few software fixes are as simple as they sound, said computer programmer Harri Hursti.
"From a security standpoint, there’s no such thing as a minimal change, because some of the worst vulnerabilities causing major breaches has been a single letter missing or a single letter being wrong in a code," Hursti said. "So that’s how little is needed to open the door" to failure, he said.
Hursti - who appears in an HBO documentary on election security - said the start of early voting next week may preclude sufficient testing before voters use the machines Monday.
But Thursday morning, members of the Fulton County Board of Elections declined to scuttle the machines in favor of paper ballots – confident that the new software won’t upend the 2020 election.
"I think during logic and accuracy testing, we'll see if anything has come up and nothing has been reported by any of the counties," Barron said.
Dominion Systems, the manufacturers of the voting machines, installed the updates in Fulton’s machines. But the state expects workers from at least some of the state’s 159 counties to complete the installations themselves – before voters use them, starting next week.