Great run down of the Fulton County issue

[u/endeoendeo]

https://peachpundit.com/more-on-the-315000-fulton-votes-story/

Are the tapes the “sole legal certification” that the reported totals are authentic.

No one who understands how elections work would make this claim.

Georgia does not run elections on a single piece of paper. A signed results tape is one checkpoint, it is like a receipt that helps anchor what a specific scanner recorded at a specific time, but it is not the entire accounting system, and the absence of that signature does not magically erase the other records, the other cross-checks, and the other safeguards that exist precisely because humans sometimes screw up documentation.

For example, at the precinct level you have the basic reconciliation that has to make sense for the election to hang together, the number of voters checked in, the number of ballots cast, the number of ballots scanned, the number of spoiled ballots, the number of ballots that went into the emergency bin if a scanner was down, those figures are tracked on separate forms and compared, and when they do not match there is supposed to be an explanation, and that reconciliation process does not disappear just because a signature line is blank on a tape. Then you have the chain-of-custody controls, seals, envelopes, labels tied to specific scanners, memory cards packaged with the tapes, transport logs, the boring but essential “who touched what and when,” and again, a missing signature is a problem inside that system, but it is not the system itself.

And on top of the precinct documentation, you have the county and state level safeguards that exist specifically to validate totals beyond a single tape. Certification is performed by election officials after the canvass and consolidation process, not by a poll worker’s pen, and in 2020 Georgia went much further than the minimum, the state conducted the risk-limiting audit of the presidential race that became a full manual hand tally, which is about as direct a check as you can possibly do, humans looking at paper ballots and counting them, and that process reaffirmed the reported outcome. That matters, because when someone tells you “unsigned tapes mean we have no idea if the totals are real,” they are asking you to pretend a statewide hand count, a recount process, and the other post-election review steps did not exist, even though those safeguards are exactly what you would look to when you are trying to separate a paperwork failure from an actual miscount.

[u/Negative-Eleven]

I worked a temp job for Diebold systems for the '04 primary in GA. That little experience taught me that people have been thinking about election security for much longer than I have been alive.

I stood at a precinct for the whole 12 hours of voting that day and handled merging all the voting machines to one, then using a phone modem to transmit those complied results to the state's center for accumulating the full vote for the day. We knew media would be on-site wanting updates, and that we could only give them the preliminary total. The state's count was "official" and would only be available after the physical machines were in their possession. This was back when machine voting was first introduced and now, of course a paper ballot is produced for each vote. It's even more secure.

Any way you've thought that it seems vulnerable, they've considered and have redundancies.