SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU A
BY ELLEN NAKASHIMA
AND AMY GARDNERThe federal government has
found no evidence that flaws in
Dominion voting machines have
ever been exploited, including in
the 2020 election, according to
the executive director of the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency.
CISA, an arm of the Depart-
ment of Homeland Security, has
notified election officials in more
than a dozen states that use the
machines of several vulnerabili-
ties and mitigation measures
that would aid in detection or
prevention of an attempt to ex-
ploit those vulnerabilities.
The move marks the first time
CISA has run voting machine
flaws through its vulnerability
disclosure program, which since
2019 has examined and disclosed
hundreds of vulnerabilities in
commercial and industrial sys-
tems that have been identified by
researchers around the world.
The program is aimed at helping
companies and consumers
b etter secure devices from
breaches.
The security of Dominion vot-
ing machines has become a flash
point in the fraught politics of
the 2020 election with support-
ers of former president Donald
Trump claiming that the results
were tainted by machines that
were manipulated, while elec-
tion officials — including Geor-
gia’s Republican secretary of
state and governor — insisted
that there was no evidence of
breaches or altered results.
There are nine flaws affecting
versions of the machine called
the Dominion Voting Systems
Democracy Suite ImageCast X,
according to a copy of an advi-
sory prepared by CISA and ob-
tained by The Washington Post.
The ImageCast X allows voters to
mark their candidate choices on
a touch-screen and then produce
a paper record, as was the case in
Georgia. It can also be used as a
paperless electronic voting ma-
chine. The flaws, many of which
are highly technical and which
mostly stem from machine de-
sign as opposed to coding errors,
generally require an attacker to
have physical access to the devic-
es or other equipment used to
manage the election, CISA said.
“We have no evidence that
these vulnerabilities have been
exploited and no evidence that
they have affected any election
results,” said Brandon Wales,
CISA’s executive director in a
statement to The Post. “Of note,
states’ standard election security
procedures would detect exploi-tation of these vulnerabilities
and in many cases would prevent
attempts entirely. This makes it
very unlikely that these vulnera-
bilities could affect an election.”
CISA conducted its review in
response to a report by two
researchers prepared as part of
long-running litigation over the
security of Georgia’s voting sys-
tem. The lead researcher, Univer-
sity of Michigan computer scien-
tist J. Alex Halderman, served as
an expert for plaintiffs who filed
the case in 2017. The plaintiffs —
a group of voters and voting
security activists — argued that
the paperless touch-screen ma-
chines Georgia was then using,
which were made by a different
company, were so lacking in
security that they violated voters’
civil rights.
Georgia agreed to acquire a
new system and in 2019 bought
Dominion ImageCast X “ballot-
marking devices,” which were
first used in 2020. The plaintiffs
now argue that this replacement
system is still too vulnerable to
manipulation, and that Georgia
should adopt a system of hand-
marked paper ballots that can be
scanned and tabulated by ma-
chine.
CISA’s five-page advisory is
based in part on Halderman’s
100-page report, which remainsunder seal in a federal court in
Atlanta. The advisory is expected
to be released in the coming
week after officials in all 50
states are notified.
CISA’s disclosure, however, is
unlikely to settle the matter. The
lawsuit over machine security is
about to enter its sixth year, and
unfounded claims of fraud con-
tinue to animate Republican vot-
ers and elected officials.
The advisory comes as a report
released Friday by The Mitre
Corporation, a federally funded
research and development cen-
ter, reached similar conclusions
to those of CISA, according to the
office of the Georgia Secretary of
State, Brad Raffensperger. The
report, which was commissioned
by Dominion, was not released
publicly.
“Both the CISA and Mitre
reports show what reasonable
people already know — if bad
actors are given full and unfet-
tered access to any system, they
can manipulate that system,”
said Gabriel Sterling, a top aide
to Raffensperger, in a statement.
“That is why procedural, opera-
tional, and legal election integri-
ty measures are crucial.”
Sterling said that like CISA,
Mitre found that existing pro-
cedural safeguards observed by
election offices “make it extreme-ly unlikely for any bad actor to
actually exploit the ... vulnerabil-
ities” Halderman found.
But Halderman, who has said
publicly that he has no evidence
that the machines’ flaws were
exploited, told The Post that the
vulnerabilities were serious and
could be used by an attacker. The
most significant, he said, is a
coding flaw that allows an at-
tacker who gains access to a
jurisdiction’s central election
computers to spread malware to
the ImageCast X machines.
“Voting systems rely on multi-
ple layers of defense including
physical and electronic safe-
guards,” he said. “These vulnera-
bilities show that unfortunately
the electronic safeguards are not
as secure as they need to be.”
The disclosures follow Tues-
day’s primary elections in Geor-
gia, which saw record turnout for
a midterm primary. No evidence
of tampering was found.
In the 2020 presidential elec-
tion, officials carried out a hand
recount of the entire state, read-
ing the candidate names off the
ballots and not just rescanning
them.
Election security experts have
raised concerns about insider
threats from election officials
who subscribe to conspiracy the-
ories about voting machines.Tina Peters, the clerk in Mesa
County, Colo., was indicted in
March on charges stemming
from her efforts to copy Domin-
ion hard drives. Peters said she
has done nothing wrong. Geor-
gia officials are investigating an
allegation that machines in Cof-
fee County were accessed by
people seeking evidence of fraud.
Election experts say that mea-
sures implemented over the
years make it extremely unlikely
that a malicious insider could
carry off a hack that alters votes
to throw an election. “In many
jurisdictions, two people are pre-
sent when handling voting and
tabulating equipment,” Maria
Benson, a spokeswoman for the
National Association of Secretar-
ies of State, told The Post. Elec-
tion officials also have imple-
mented extensive security mea-
sures, she said, “including con-
trolling physical access to
election-related systems, ensur-
ing they have adequate backups,
and testing the accuracy of sys-
tems and processes before and
after each election.”
Dominion was aware of the
vulnerabilities and told CISA
that its systems can be updated
to address them, the agency said.Emma Brown contributed to this
report.No evidence of exploitation of Dominion voting machine flaws, CISA finds
BY JUSTIN SONDELbuffalo — The final victim of
the racist attack on a Buffalo
supermarket has been laid to
rest.
The solemn occasion on Satur-
day celebrating the life of Ruth E.
Whitfield, the 86-year-old matri-
arch of her family, was the last
funeral for the 10 victims of the
May 14 attack allegedly carried
out by 18-year-old Payton
Gendron. Authorities say he
drove more than three hours and
targeted the Tops grocery store in
the heart of Buffalo with the
intent of killing Black people.
A 600-page document attrib-
uted to the shooter goes into
great detail about how he chose
the Buffalo supermarket after
researching other locations
around New York state, includ-
ing in Syracuse and Rochester.
Since the shooting, many
Black Buffalonians have been in
fear of going into public places
like stores, wondering whether
an attack might happen here
again.
The shooting, which horrified
the nation just two weeks ago,
seems to have been quickly over-
shadowed by another senseless
mass shooting, the massacre in
Uvalde, Tex., on Tuesday. But to
the community here, the service
also served as a call to action, full
of desperate pleas for lawmakers
to put measures in place to
prevent more gun violence.
Civil rights attorney Ben
Crump urged legislators to take
up gun-control measures during
his blistering speech. He repeat-
edly returned to the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr.’s calls to stand up
to evil when you see it in the
world.
“We cannot condone evil,”
Crump said. “We must protest
evil.”
Vice President Harris and her
husband, Doug Emhoff, also at-
tended services after meeting
privately with Whitfield’s family.
“We will not allow small peo-
ple to create fear in our commu-
nities,” Harris told the crowd of
more than 400 people at Mount
Olive Baptist Church, about two
miles from the site of the killing.
Whitfield was remembered as
an anchor by her family, includ-
ing her son, former Buffalo fire
commissioner Garnell W. Whit-
field, his three siblings and
throngs of mourners.
Garnell Whitfield told a story
about how, as a Mother’s Day gift,
he built his mother a raised
garden bed in the days leading
up to the attack. She asked him
whether he was going to use it to
grow vegetables after she was
gone, he recalled.
“She was telling me, ‘Leave
that box alone,’ ” Whitfield said.
“... She wasn’t trying to grow
seeds in that box. She had been
tending her seeds all her life.
That fruit had ripened. It had
matured.”
While the mood of the service
was celebratory, many of the
speakers also viewed the funeral
as an opportunity to address
important issues of systemic rac-
ism in Buffalo and beyond. The
Rev. Al Sharpton urged mourn-
ers to use the deaths of the
Buffalo 10, as the victims have
come to be called, as motivation
to continue to push for laws that
will prevent the next racist
shooting.
“We’re going to build a new
Buffalo in the name of these 10,”
Sharpton said. “We want eco-nomic development right here in
Buffalo.”
Outside, after the service was
over, politicians from around the
state joined Crump and Sharpton
to continue calling for more ac-
tion on gun laws and pushing for
further economic development
in the city’s East Side.The Tops supermarket where
the attack occurred is the only
full-service market in the city’s
predominantly Black East Side,
and was a hard-won victory
when it opened in 2003, the
result of years of advocacy from
neighborhood activists. Food ac-
cess remains scarce in the neigh-borhoods east of Main Street.
Crystal D. Peoples-Stokes (D),
the New York State Assembly
majority leader and a lifelong
East Side resident, pressed her
Republican colleagues in the leg-
islature to take up laws that
could help to prevent gun vio-
lence.“I don’t want your thoughts or
your prayers,” Peoples-Stokes
said. “I want action. I need you to
stop opposing opportunities to
get guns out of the hands of
people who shouldn’t have
them.”
Mayor Byron Brown (D) said
he too will continue to push
lawmakers at every level.
“We will not be silent on that,”
Brown said. “We will work in a
collective fashion to hold the
lawmakers in Washington that
refuse to act and the gun manu-
facturers who put profit over the
sanctity of human life — we will
hold them accountable.”
Before boarding a plane back
to Washington, Harris urged leg-
islators to impose a ban on
assault weapons.
“I will say as I’ve said countless
times, we are not sitting around
waiting to figure out what the
solution looks like,” she said in
comments to the media. “You
know how an assault weapon
was designed? It was designed
for a specific purpose: to kill a lot
of human beings quickly.”Alongside remembrances, calls for gun control in Buffalo
Harris, other politicians
and activists attend final
funeral for attack victimsGEOFF ROBINS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGESKEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERSABOVE: Vice President Harris
and her husband, Doug Emhoff,
on Saturday visit a memorial to
the 10 people killed in the mass
shooting at a Tops supermarket
in Buffalo on May 14. They
attended the funeral of Ruth E.
Whitfield, the last of the
victims to be laid to rest.
LEFT: Angela Crawley and
Robin Harris, Whitfield’s
daughters, receive hugs next to
a portrait of their mother
during her funeral.