The questions raised about Dominion voting machines finally got the best form of sunlight today – sworn testimony in open court subject to cross-examination.
Election security experts Clay Parikh and Ben Cotton testified today in Fulton County (Atlanta) Superior Court. They testified that they were able to identify the master encryption passwords that were stored in plain text and unsecured in the Dominion voting machine databases. They also testified that basic security protocols require that these passwords be kept separate and secret so that only authorized people can access them.
This information was given to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger no later than March 2024, lawyers said at the hearing.
If the allegations are true, they are explosive and have far-reaching implications that go back years. Many claims about problems with voting machines have been either overstated or completely fabricated, which has done much to discredit any legitimate attempts to boost voting confidence.
In fact, the left probably wants the right to make exaggerated or false claims about election integrity. It gives them a weapon to apply when legitimate questions are raised. It has the added benefit of likely suppressing turnout on the right by dampening enthusiasm.
However, that does not mean that our electoral processes are beyond control. And today, two experts asked legitimate questions that deserve answers.
Most explosively, is it true that the master encryption key for all machines is contained in plaintext, noticeable to anyone with access to the machines?
Amazingly, even though this claim has been in the public domain since at least April, there has been no response from anyone in any government agency, let alone an actual hearing, as to whether these claims have any merit that I could find in web searches.
But Georgia, with its Republican Governor Brian Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, would surely assure us that this is not the case, or that they want to ensure that this is not the case?
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Instead, Raffensperger’s lawyers went to court and fought against the issuance of an order to ensure that this is not the case. And instead of fighting with facts that refute the allegations, Raffensperger relies on non-factual defenses.
The plaintiffs filed this lawsuit too slow, he says. They filed a lawsuit in the wrong court, he says. They lack respect, he says.
Nowhere does he say: “It is not true that the master key is visibly contained in the machines’ databases.”
Instead, the lawyers used a very legal trick in their submissions to the court. I have to quote it for full context:
The claims in the motion are not modern – they are the same discredited conspiracy theories about Georgia’s electoral system that have been repeatedly put forward and rejected by the courts. The so-called “experts” that the applicant relies on to support his claims have made other claims about the same voting system used in Georgia that have been rejected as frivolous, and not only have courts rejected them, but a federal court has also ruled on this rule 11 Sanctions were appropriate.
(The file then cites the recent case in Arizona as support Lake v. HobbsF.Supp.3 1015.)
This passage, the only passage in her 23 page submitted response which even attempts to address the factual allegations is trying to give the impression that the allegations have been verified, even though this has not been the case. This needs to be analyzed sentence by sentence:
“The allegations in the application are not new […]”
While this is technically true – one of the lawyers in this case attempted to incorporate it into another case at a slow stage and was denied the opportunity to do so – the allegations are modern in that they must be examined individually to determine whether they are true or not not by a court.
“[The claims] These are the same discredited conspiracy theories about Georgia’s electoral system that have been repeatedly put forward and rejected by the courts […]”
This amounts to a misrepresentation to the court as it is clearly inconsistent with previous claims about the Dominion voting systems. It has been claimed for years that Dominion voting systems are insecure. These claims typically focused on things like, to quote the Raffensperger case cited above, “operating systems and antivirus software that lack necessary updates; open ports on the election management server allowing possible remote access; shared accounts and shared passwords; Access by unauthorized users to the Internet or mobile networks through election servers and devices; and secret content that is not subject to objective and public analysis.” These allegations have not been made in any of the previous legal proceedings. For legal purposes, this is a modern allegation.
“The so-called ‘experts’ on whom the applicant relies in support of his claims…”
Attempts to undermine Parikh and Cotton’s expertise with affordable adjectives failed. The trial judge today qualified both Parikh and Cotton as experts in their fields, as they had previously done. This unsupported insinuation by Raffensperger’s lawyers, for which there was no evidence in court today, now looks even worse. They are not “so-called ‘experts’”. They are experts.
“[Parikh and Cotton] have made other claims about the same voting system used by Georgia that have been rejected as frivolous, and not only have they been dismissed by courts, but a federal court also ruled that Rule 11 sanctions were appropriate.”
This is the most legalistic of all legal deceptions. These allegations did not precede the court case cited by Raffensperger’s lawyers. The court also issued a procedural dismissal. The veracity of any election integrity allegations was not assessed.
So these allegations were made by court-certified experts under penalty of perjury after revealing the sources for their findings, and a Republican state politician can only respond with procedural defenses?
In normal litigation, the parties always present their procedural defenses first. But this is about election integrity in Georgia, one of the most watched and controversial issues in our country. Isn’t that worth a direct response from a Republican administration? Why not more transparency? Why do you need a local Republican district association to fight a lawsuit? Why was the truth of the allegations not even disputed in cross-examination?
The trial judge said today he is expected to rule on Rafffensperger’s directed sentencing motion “by the end of the week.” This judge, like any other judge facing election integrity lawsuits, has options to procedurally dismiss the case if he wants to avoid a sensitive issue. That may be likely in this case, since this is the same judge — Scott McAfee — who presided over the hearing to disqualify Fani Willis for hiring her lover as a prosecutor in the Trump RICO case. He issued a very mediocre opinion in this case, ordering that she or Wade drop out of the case, but refused to dismiss the case and still faced a far-left challenger in his re-election campaign. He knows people are watching. (The YouTube stream of today’s hearing, which you can watch below, had over a thousand viewers throughout.)
However, if the judge refuses to save Brad Raffensperger, things could get very fascinating.
