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December 14, 2024
To: Members of the Georgia General Assembly
The 2024 General Assembly required the Secretary of State to undertake a 2024 pilot program using Optical Character Recognition (“OCR”) technology to “verify the human-readable text portion of the ballot.” The Secretary reportedly spent approximately $1.5 million for the November pilot. The results were reported at the December 11 meeting of the State Election Board by Enhanced Voting, the vendor for the project. (The $1.5 million does not consider the considerable county staff time for this effort in all 159 counties.)
-Was the project a worthwhile investment? Hard to say, but it certainly had value.
-Did it accomplish the goals of the legislation? Even harder to say. (See below.)
-Did the project live up to Secretary Raffensperger’s claims? Absolutely not! (This is important for lawmakers to understand.)
The Basics of the Completed Project
Enhanced Voting appears to have professionally accomplished what they were engaged to do, --to tabulate the votes on all races using the human readable text on the digital ballot images, and compare those tabulated results to the officially reported results. In the process of doing so, they located errors in a few counties’ certified results, which required a correction and recertification. It’s important to remember that the project as designed, despite Secretary Raffensperger’s unfounded claims, had no ability to test:
-- the accuracy or security of the election as a whole,
--whether all ballots were counted,
--whether ballots were counted once and only once,
--whether digital images accurately reflected the printed votes on the original paper ballots, or
--whether the QR code was accurately coded or read.
For example, this pilot as designed, could not detect ballots that were double-scanned and double-counted, obviously undermining the accuracy of the certified tallies. And yes, there were such uncorrected errors, although not outcome-changing errors.
Goals of the Project
The General Assembly required in O.C.G.A. §21-2-498.1 that the pilot project should “verify the human-readable text portion of the ballot.” Depending on which lawmaker you talk with, you get quite different interpretations of what the project was meant to “verify.” In the end, the OCR project reportedly verified that the tabulation of the votes printed on text on the ballot was generally consistent with updated official results for the BMD ballots.
The legislation did not specify what it means to “verify the human-readable text.” Certainly no one can “verify” what touchscreen selections the voter made, or the accuracy of the text. That is the problem with BMDs. Voters cannot and do not check their paper ballot text accurately, and therefore the text on the ballot is merely a reflection of what the touchscreen computer printed. Therefore the election outcome cannot be “verified.”
The General Assembly, understanding what such a project can and cannot achieve with BMD ballots, may wish to determine whether an OCR-driven test of the tabulation of the text provides value to justify the expenditure, or perhaps increase the scope to provide more meaningful testing. If the project is renewed, the significant costs of county implementation should not be overlooked.
Secretary Raffensperger’s Misinformation Campaign
It should be noted that Enhanced Voting, the vendor, appeared to accurately report their findings, and did not exaggerate their scope or conclusions. Their President answered the SEB members’ questions professionally and factually. However, Secretary Raffensperger made wildly exaggerated unfounded claims and sought to mislead the press, election officials and public about the scope and findings of the project. In his misleading November 25, 2024 press release, he falsely claimed that the “audit” proved the votes were counted, “accurately, securely, and quickly.” The project had no ability to even begin to assess any of those desirable attributes, or his QR code assertions.
Despite the tabulation errors described in vendor’s report, the Secretary inaccurately boasted there had been “zero differences,” and that the “audit” source documents were paper ballots, although the “audit” was conducted on unverified digital images. He made the wildly unfounded claim that the project showed that the voting system “worked accurately and can be trusted.” We understand his politically-driven desire to restore confidence in the vulnerable compromised touchscreen system, but a deceptive campaign is unethical and inappropriate. Lawmakers should be aware of the misrepresentations as the project is considered for renewal.
We wrote county election officials with specifics, on Tuesday before the SEB meeting to warn them of Secretary Raffensperger’s misleading claims so that they could be prepared to address questions from their counties’ voters and their local press. We hope you will read our run-down of the facts.
Implications for the Upcoming Legislative Session
With contentious claims of a stolen 2020 election and massive voter fraud hopefully behind us, we believe that current environment will permit the legislature to conduct a scientific evidence-based candid examination of the security failures and very real cybersecurity risks of the BMD voting system. As the Honorable Judge Amy Totenberg wrote about the risk of exploitation of the BMD system, after examining the evidence, --it is not a question of “might this happen” but “when it will happen.” Georgia cannot reasonably continue to conduct such high risk elections. We urge you to urgently address this deeply concerning risk in your upcoming session.
Thank you for your service to Georgia voters.
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