In 2017, Professor J. Alex Halderman demonstrated to the Senate Intelligence Committee that it was very easy to rig Dominion voting machines. The corporation had then overhauled its machines in order to guarantee the integrity of the ballots.

During the 2020 US presidential election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (Republican) encouraged residents of his state to vote by mail and provided Dominion machines for those who were determined to vote in person.

President Donald Trump had contacted Secretary Brad Raffensperger by phone. Their conversation was recorded and cherry-picked excerpts were used against him; Mr. Raffensperger insisted that President Trump had pressured him to modify the Georgia results.

This gave rise to considerable controversy over the transparency of the election results in that state.

In-mail votes are counted by Georgia government employees, often without public oversight. Machine votes are tabulated by the machines themselves.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) had assured that the Dominion machines were absolutely reliable and that the result of their count brought victory for candidate Joe Biden.

In view of the controversy, the State of Georgia then commissioned Professor J. Alex Halderman to draft a report. However, CISA filed a lawsuit against Georgia to prevent the declassification of the report, on the pretext that it would allow ill-intentioned people to hack into these voting machines.

For his part, Secretary Raffensperger has joined many voters in calling for the declassification. Now it is likely that the declassification will finally be authorized by a judge … but only after the “sensitive” parts of the document have been redacted. ‎

CISA has not responded to questions about its change in attitude in relation to the position it held in 2020.

It is worth remembering that in democratic countries the counting of votes cast during an election is a public act. ‎