Ga. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger discusses ‘health checks’ voting machines statewide

ALBANY, Ga. (WALB) - WALB’s Jim Wallace sat down with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to see how security checks on voting machines have gone as preparations are already being made for future elections.

I’m joined now by the Secretary of State for the State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, and he is doing what is being called “health checks” on the state’s voting equipment. Tell me what’s going on, Mr. Secretary.

“Our office is going around the state of Georgia, all 159 counties, and doing security checks and health checks of all the equipment,” Raffensperger said. “We also have called in both GBI and DHS to look at physical, you know, site security. And we also obviously coming into 2024, will be again having very robust cyber security checks. But right now, we’re looking at all the equipment, making sure that nothing has been tampered with, and we’ve done about 50% of all the counties so far. We can conclusively say that none of the machines have been tampered with. A few things like light bulbs that cracks screen, but other than that the counties look like they’re in great shape and I’ll be down, you know, and be down in Lee County later this week.”

Doing these kind of checks, of course, the polls say people are concerned by election integrity doing these kinds of checks. Do you believe that will help assure that people of Georgia?

“Yeah, it should definitely. People should be. Should feel very secure about where we are with election integrity and security. Also, accessibility in that. Because no matter how you vote now in Georgia, it will be based on photo ID. If you want to vote early or in person on Election Day these kinds, that is always going to be based on photo ID. But now, with the absentee voting, that’s also based with driver’s license number, which is photo ID based. And so, that’s a really strong way of shoring up people’s confidence. Also shores up security. We also have 17 days early voting, so we are recognized right now as also having the cleanest voter list in the entire country. Also, we want to make sure everyone understands that the voter rolls are clean. The machines are accurate, and we have plenty of opportunities, so you can go early on Election Day, or no excuse absentee voting. We expect 2024 to be a fairly strongly participated election.”

A lot of people might not know, but these election machines, what happens between elections where these machines are obviously kept very secure.

“Right. And that’s one of the things that part of our health check, we’re checking what is the security of the facility, whether these are secure. We’ve done through that. We’ll give everyone a check mark. Yeah, the pass or fail, and the count has done a really good job, and then now we’re going through it. Just really making sure that none of the software or any department machine has been tampered with by bad actors.”

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