Putnam County’s voting systems – hardware and software – have been deemed “secure, unaltered, and fully functioning,” according to the office of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
That judgment comes after the first of a four-part plan to assure the public of election integrity, as the calendar moves toward municipal and special elections next month and a full slate of primaries and elections next year.
Dubbed a “health test” of all the state’s election equipment and programs, a specialist visited the Putnam County Board of Elections offices a couple of weeks ago and randomly selected a half-dozen or so pieces of voting equipment through which to run a test program. All were tested successfully and found to be working as intended.
The tests continued. “That’s my job. It will take about two days, using what the secretary of state sends,” Putnam County Elections Supervisor Kim Rudolph said.
Putnam has 72 ballot marking devices (BMDs), or in layman’s terms, the touchscreen machines that voters use to cast their ballots. These are stored and moved around in suitcase-sized carriers.
Additionally, there are 12 tabulators, usually distributed to each voting site. They are black boxes about the size of a washing machine.
“They are just scanners and counters” of the paper ballots voters turn in, Rudolph explained. “We can’t see the results until the polls close on election day,” she added.
Neither the touchscreens nor the tabulators are connected to Wi-Fi or to the internet. When the polls close and the paperwork checks out, the poll manager inserts a flash drive into the tabulator to retrieve the data.
As the flash drives are turned in to the Board of Elections office, they are taken to a server in the supervisor’s office which is internet-connected. That is how Georgia’s 2,700 or so precincts report their election results to the elections division of the secretary of state’s office.
The last pieces of equipment to be tested in this first “health check” are the local office’s two servers. All 86 pieces of equipment in Putnam were tested, but the numbers pale in comparison to some of the state’s larger counties. Putnam County has about 22,000 people, according to the 2020 census.
Discounting those under 18, registered voters number approximately 16,000, and if half actually cast ballots in a given election, it is usually considered a “strong” turnout.
By comparison, counties like Fulton and Gwinnett, each with more than a million residents, hold a 50-to-1 ratio over Putnam in terms of population and voters – and likewise, in all the election equipment required for them to cast ballots.
All the equipment in the election offices of the state’s 159 counties will be tested. Putnam joins about 70 of the counties where testing has been completed as of last week, according to the secretary of state’s office.
Though some tinkering has been done since the 2020 and 2022 election cycles for three of the four parts of the testing plan, the only really new element added for the 2023-24 cycle is testing during the election for any evidence of hacking, spyware, or malware.
The tricky part of testing during an election comes in not using actual vote counts as they are being cast.
One technique, according to Elections Division Public Information Director Mike Massinger, is to replace a computer’s program with what amounts to “jibberish.” If it comes back as the same “jibberish,” it means the computer has not been attacked. In more everyday terms, Massinger said, “You can turn a pig into sausage, but turning sausage back into a pig is pretty hard.”
The third part of the overall elections security plan involves voters re-checking printed paper ballots before turning them in for scanning and counting. A University of Georgia study during the 2020 election found that 80 percent of voters reviewed their ballots.
“I would be surprised if it were anything less than 80 percent in our county,” Rudolph said. “We reminded voters to check their (paper) ballots, and they did.”
The fourth part of the plan comes in the politically sensitive time after an election, with newly authorized “robust post-election procedures” to detect “anomalies” in voting results. For instance, the running joke about Georgia’s vaunted “cemetery vote” is now checked against the Social Security Administration’s database for deaths, Massinger said.
The four-part plan apparently leans heavily on not only local government involvement – and labor – but on random testing and statistical probability theory, where the standard is now a 95-percent confidence level in the accuracy of the data.
“That 95 percent figure does not mean the vote totals are 95 percent accurate,” an election official stated. “It means that we are 95 percent confident that the vote totals are accurate.”