The firm hired by Georgia’s secretary of state to conduct an “audit” of Dominion Voting Systems technology used during the 2020 elections is the same one that previously certified the Dominion systems and also approved a last-minute system-wide software change just weeks before the election.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger failed to disclose that the company, Pro V&V, had a preexisting relationship with Dominion that dated back years, in his Nov. 17 statement announcing the results of the audit.
Raffensperger also failed to disclose that Dominion had used technical conclusions from Pro V&V in a pre-election Georgia lawsuit that questioned the reliability of Dominion’s systems during a last-minute software fix before the Nov. 3 election. The testing from Pro V&V had been characterized as “superficial” and “cursory testing” by an expert cited in court documents.
In the widely quoted statement, Raffensperger said that the audit of Dominion machines was complete, there was “no sign of foul play,” and that “Pro V&V found no evidence” of tampering with the machines:
“We are glad but not surprised that the audit of the state’s voting machines was an unqualified success,” said Secretary Raffensperger. “Election security has been a top priority since day one of my administration. We have partnered with the Department of Homeland Security, the Georgia Cyber Center, Georgia Tech security experts, and wide range of other election security experts around the state and country so Georgia voters can be confident that their vote is safe and secure.”
Raffensperger also included a description of Pro V&V in his statement, but again failed to disclose the firm’s relationship with Dominion, nor did he address the fact that Pro V&V appears to be a very small and private company that operates out of a single office suite.
In July 2019, Georgia purchased a $106 million election system from Dominion. In a lawsuit that originated in 2017, critics contended that the new Dominion system was subject to many of the same security vulnerabilities as the one it was replacing. Raffensperger was listed as a defendant in the case, and state and county attorneys have been present at various hearings.
Following Georgia’s purchase of the Dominion system, two employees from Pro V&V, Michael Walker and Wendy Williams, approved the testing report for Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite 5.5-A for the State of Georgia on Nov. 26, 2019. Additionally, it was these same individuals who provided this year’s April 13 and June 16 testing of Dominion’s modified Democracy Suite 5.5-C. Williams would also play a role in some last-minute certification issues for Dominion.
But even here, there was an issue. The specific software version 5.5-A, ultimately used by Georgia, had actually been tested by SLI for Pennsylvania, and wasn’t tested by Pro V&V—a matter that would be later noted by the courts:
“Mr. Cobb’s first affidavit discloses that Pro V&V did not itself conduct any form of penetration or security testing of the 5.5-A software version specifically to be used in Georgia (certified by Dominion in August 2019) but relied on another company’s security testing of earlier versions of the Dominion Democracy Suite software.”
Instead, Pro V&V had relied on its initial testing of the Dominion Suite 5.5 version. And as the courts noted, “Dr. [Eric] Coomer testified that there is a difference between the 5.5 and 5.5-A Dominion Democracy Suite versions – a change to the ICX software that was not deemed de minimis.”
In an Aug. 24 sworn declaration, Harri Hursti, an acknowledged expert on electronic voting security, provided a first-hand description of problems he observed with Georgia’s new voting systems during the June 9 statewide primary election and the runoff elections on Aug. 11.
Hursti told the court of a series of problems, including that “the scanner and tabulation software settings being employed to determine which votes to count on hand-marked paper ballots are likely causing clearly intentioned votes not to be counted.”
Then, during pre-election testing of Dominion’s voting systems in late September, Georgia officials discovered a problem relating to the displays for the U.S. Senate race, finding that under certain circumstances, not all of the candidates’ names would fit properly onto a single screen.
During the back and forth of court proceedings, lawyers for Dominion described the problem and the resulting software fix as “de minimis” and one that didn’t invalidate the previously issued EAC certification. Lawyers for “voting integrity activists,” already involved in lawsuits over Georgia’s new Dominion system, voiced concerns over “the severity of the problem and the security of a last-minute fix.”
Some of these concerns were echoed by the court, which noted that, due to the statewide implementation of the software modification, there could be “larger implications.” The issue wasn’t a small one, as explained by a Dr. J. Alex Halderman, a security expert present at the hearing:
“I would like to reiterate the substance of the security concerns that I have. We have to be clear that even if the change to the source code is a small one, as Dominion says it is, the process of updating this software requires replacing completely the core of the Dominion software on every BMD.”
Dominion had submitted the software fix to Pro V&V for evaluation. Again, Pro V&V had recently provided certification testing for Dominion’s Democracy Suite 5.5-C on April 20 and June 16, leading to the July 9 EAC certification but hadn’t caught the software problem at the time.
On Dec. 3, during a Georgia Senate Government Oversight Committee meeting on election fraud, Ryan Germany, counsel for Georgia’s secretary of state’s office, again addressed the issue of the Dominion equipment audit, noting that:
“That’s something we’ve already done. We had an independent voting systems testing lab come in after the election and audit a cross-section of our machines … What they found was the machines were working exactly properly. The software on the machines is exactly what’s supposed to be on there.”
Germany also stated that Pro V&V goes in to “check the hash value, make sure that it’s what we expect, and it was in every instance.”
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