If you have been subjected to any part of the VoterGA dog and pony shows in the past year, you likely heard the utterance of the term the “Halderman Report.”

This report came about through the process of a lawsuit, short-form called “Curling v. Raffensperger.” I’ll get to the pertinent details of that lawsuit shortly so you’ll understand the beginning.

The Halderman report has become the basis for the mad attempts by VoterGA, and many of its gullible followers, to attempt to replace Georgia’s electronic voting system with a “system” relying 100% on hand-marked ballots and hand tabulation of those hand-marked ballots.

Meaning, not running hand-marked ballots through optical-scanners as we did have in this state, circa late 1990s, but complete hand-tabulation of ballots by thousands of humans (and their individual judgement) across Georgia.

I’m here to explain why the Halderman Report should be treated as a red herring to be ignored, and that every elected official (and every Board of Elections’ appointee) should ignore the nuts who walk around with T-shirts that display “PAPER BALLOTS PLEASE”…and politely (or, not so, as the need arises) tell them to go pound sand.

Curling v. Raffensperger

The initial lawsuit was actually Curling, et al. v Kemp et al., filed in 2017. “Curling” is just the name of the first Plaintiff’s name, Donna Curling.

The lawsuit was filed to challenge the outcome of the 2017 Special Election to replace U.S. Rep. Tom Price, who got an appointment in the new Trump Administration.

Karen Handel won that special election, beating out Jon Ossoff in a runoff.

Democrats, and a Colorado-based Democrat-run 501(c)(3) called “Coalition for Good Governance,” filed a lawsuit challenging the then-method of voting via the Diebold DRE machines.

Also included in the Curling plaintiffs was one of the Founders of VoterGA, Ricardo Davis.

When Kemp was replaced by newly elected SOS Brad Raffensperger, his name became the name for the Defendants on the lawsuit as it wended its way to the Northern District of Georgia, into the courtroom of a 2011 Obama-appointed judge named Amy Totenberg (sister of Nina Totenberg, of NPR).

The Plaintiffs first argued that the DRE machines were unconstitutional, and demanded the State go to hand-marking ballots. (In fact, you will find that demand for hand-marked ballots to be the main focal point of their entire lawsuit…which we will visit more in detail in the future.)

Then when the Georgia election law was changed in 2019 with the passage of HB 316, they switched arguments to demand, again, that the new BMD machines were unconstitutional in that the bar code printed on the ballot could not be interpreted by the human eye. And, again, demanded the state switch to hand-marked, hand-tabulated paper ballots.

Acolytes of VoterGA have stated, incessantly, that (paraphrasing) “Judge Totenberg found the BMDs to be illegal!”

Except, that is not true, as you can fully read her orders here, near the end of that document.

Also, the Plaintiffs lost a bit more when the State Defendants appealed some issues to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. And, you are free to read this 24-page Order that summarizes the cases and final decisions.

The most fascinating part of that 11th Circuit decision can be found on the last page:

“It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the right to vote. But in our efforts to protect that right, federal courts must resist the temptation to step into the role of elected representatives, weighing the costs and benefits of various procedures when the State has already done so in a reasonable and nondiscriminatory way. Because this suit invites us to do just that—and because the district court accepted that invitation—we VACATE its preliminary injunction on the State’s paper backup check-in list, as well as its related directives on provisional and emergency ballots.”

THAT ^^^ is legal language that tells the plaintiffs and Totenberg to go pound sand. It demonstrates a Court that knows it should stay in its lane, and not play “legislator.”

If you are up to reading a 98-page technical study on the various ways a computer expert (and his assistant) hacked into “discovering” all the highly unlikely ways the Dominion voting system for Georgia could potentially be compromised, you are free to download and read this entire Halderman document on your own.

If you want the Cliff’s Notes version, I’ll lay it out for you here.

“Halderman” is Prof. J. Alex Halderman, Ph.D., an expert witness hired by the Plaintiffs in the Curling lawsuit to analyze and test Georgia’s Dominion System for security weaknesses. In that 98-page tome, on Page 60 of 96, there is a full page of his background and qualifications, but I am only snapshotting the first two paragraphs here:

Welll…he sounds like a pretty smart fellow, eh? On Page 4 of his Report, in the Overview section, Halderman discloses this in regards to his analysis of the Georgia elections system:

“To assist the Court in understanding the risks that the system creates, Curling Plaintiffs asked me to conduct a security analysis of the ImageCast X (ICX) BMD and associated equipment used in Georgia elections. Using an ICX provided by Fulton County, I played the role of an attacker and attempted to discover ways to compromise the system and change votes…

“I, along with my assistant, spent a total of approximately twelve person-weeks studying the machines, testing for vulnerabilities, and developing proof-of-concept attacks. Many of the attacks I successfully implemented could be effectuated by malicious actors with very limited time and access to the machines, as little as mere minutes.”

His “assistant” was another Ph.D. computer expert, someone named Prof. Drew Springall, Ph.D.

So, the analysis wasn’t a case of an expert with a mere graduate ‘assistant’ helping him. It was two highly educated Ph.D. experts who spent a total of “approximately 12 person-weeks” studying the machines, testing various things, etc., with no time-clock on how much time they spent, OR what they were allowed to do.

A person-week is, I am guessing, 40 hours or so, since us in the regular world (i.e., non-academic) are used to the minimum 40-hour work week.  Forty hours per week times 12 weeks gives us an approximate total of 480 hours.

Split between two people, that makes it 240 hours each…estimate 30 days per person (8 hours per day) of straight focus on find this/test this, find that/test that…and so on in multiple iterations of testing.

He was given full access to play with the Dominion machines to spend as much time as he wanted, to test every option he could think of to “break” into the system.  He was also given all passwords. AND, he was an “expert.”

Sooooo…are we to believe that random ‘bad actors’ could implement an attack on a BMD in “as little as mere minutes” when it took Mr. Super Computer Expert 240 hours or so, in an isolated environment, and given ALL passwords, to figure out how to attack and corrupt the voting process?

This is all sounding suspiciously similar to the case of Mr. Tipton’s Magic Grits (My Cousin Vinny reference) where it supposedly took the “expert grits-cooker” 5 minutes to cook regular grits, when it takes at least 20 minutes for any self-respecting Southerner to make their grits from scratch.

Is Halderman sure about that “…mere minutes…” that it would take a malicious-minded (but NOT a top-security expert like Halderman) bad actor to access and compromise the BMDs in a polling location in a county in Georgia?

And that is a key advantage to this Dominion system: Each county runs their elections in a silo, so to speak. IF someone truly corrupt (whether a corrupt employee or corrupt Board of Elections’ member) manages to corrupt a county’s BMD operations, it will not spread to any other county. The BMDs are NOT connected, either by hard wire or Internet, to any other county’s election system.

And, while Halderman loves to bring-in those eeeeeevil Russians who could be eyeing an opportunity to corrupt Georgia’s voting systems (I am not making that up…this “elections expert” brings them into his analysis on Page 6 of 96), they will need to know more than being able to write and execute a SQL statement.

Near the 36-minute mark of this video, Halderman is speaking, and he admits there is no evidence Dominion machines were hacked in Georgia in 2020 or that machines were compromised. Wow.

Weird. I mean, after all, any damn fool with “…mere minutes…” could have hacked the system, according to Halderman. Why didn’t they?

Here’s an example of something that is bizarrely presented by Halderman as a thing we should worry about. On Page 56 of 96, he introduces at Paragraph 11.2: “A Dishonest Poll Worker with Access to the ICP Memory Card can Deanonymize All Voted Ballots”

Well, suuuurrre…if you want to be concerned about dishonest poll workers, we should likely look at canceling ALL elections, right? Why?

Because, IF we were to go to hand-marked paper ballots, many dishonest poll workers could easily raid the ballot boxes in multiple precincts, check for Republican-majority ballots, remove them from the polling location, and SHRED THEM ALL!!!

“Ballots? What ballots you talkin’ about, Willis? We don’t see no stinkin’ ballots!…”

I mean, THAT ^^^ is the exact scenario that will take place if the State of Georgia rushes to attempt to implement hand-marked paper ballots that the crazy alarmists at VoterGA want us to use.

Nope, sorry, David Cross. Counties don’t have magic money available to place security cameras of the types needed to cover the 2600+ polling locations in the state to ensure errant poll workers don’t break into paper-ballot holding boxes.

Besides, video-cameras can be easily defeated…more easily than plugging a malicious-software infused USB stick into a BMD and attempting to corrupt an election.

The fact is (and, I will be delving very, very deep into the subject of paper ballots in upcoming PVs), the security infrastructure that would have to be created for a minimally reliable ballot chain of custody system to be able to implement paper balloting on a statewide scale would take upwards of two years or more to design and implement.

And all these knuckleheads at VoterGA want the State of Georgia to play Jeannie by folding their arms, nodding their head, and blinking really hard to transform our election system to a paper balloting system overnight.

The Real J. Alex Halderman

Why should you be skeptical of Halderman and his “expert report?”

Could it be his history of encouraging Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of the 2016 General Election to challenge the voting results in Michigan, Pennsylvania, & Wisconsin, three states Trump won that year?

Or, his working with the 2016 Green Party Candidate for President Jill Stein in both 2017 and 2020, where Federal District Judge Paul Diamond (a Bush appointee) determined that Halderman was, at his essence, untruthful in his testimony:

“Halderman’s testimony was neither credible nor helpful. Throughout, he acted more as an advocate than an “expert.” Halderman repeatedly tried to avoid answering questions when the truthful response might not help Stein. (See, e.g., 2/19/20 Tr. 6:12-8:2, 9:24-10:4.) He routinely offered opinions without factual basis, apparently seeking to bolster Stein’s litigation position. (See, e.g., id. 16:14-18-7, 62:18-63:7, 66:13-16, 80:9-15, 82:2-83:8.) Indeed, Halderman’s “advocacy” was so vigorous, I was compelled to caution him (to no avail). (Id. 62:18-64:4.)

“Curiously, Stein’s designated monitor could not recall when he first learned about the XL’s basic features, and knew very little about how the XL is used in Pennsylvania. (See, e.g., 2/19/20 Tr. 103:10-12.) Halderman could not recall how he familiarized himself with the XL. (Id. 99:22-100:19.) He was unable to explain why he had sent “feedback” to Mr. Maazel encouraging the Commonwealth to certify the ExpressVote XL (with restrictions not relevant to this dispute). (2/19/20 Tr. 53:11-19.)

“Halderman’s testimony that he could not recall either when he learned of the XL’s key features, or its testing and certification by the Commonwealth (thus making him incompetent to advise Stein during settlement negotiations), was certainly untrue. (See, e.g., id. 88:8-91:9, 99:9-100:9.) Remarkably, even Dr. Stein apparently understands that Halderman has little credibility: she urges that “when it comes to settlement discussions and the meaning of terms in the Agreement, Dr. Halderman’s views are irrelevant.” (Pls.’ Proposed Findings of Facts ¶ 127 n.6.)

“In sum, there is no truth in Dr. Halderman’s “hacking” testimony.”

WOW. What a rebuke!  Let me repeat that last line from Federal District Judge Diamond: “…there is no truth in Dr. Halderman’s “hacking” testimony.”

In Summary…

We have VoterGA pushing for EVERYONE to believe everything a Leftist, Anti-Trump Professor J. Alex Halderman says in his fear-mongering report about the Dominion voting system we have in place in Georgia, along with the idea that we should hold the rulings issued by an Obama-appointed Federal Judge (Amy Totenberg) in some kind of hallowed esteem, several of which have been overruled by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals…and we should all get onboard the train to push hand-marked, hand-tabulated paper ballots to be THE system to be implemented as quickly as possible for the 2024 elections?

Contrast all that with the evidence I presented earlier in the discussion that a) Halderman’s report has many useless fear-mongering and unbelievable parts of it, and b) the compelling decision from a conservative-appointed judge who found that “…Halderman has little credibility…” in the 2020 case in which Prof. Halderman was the go-to “expert” for Jill Stein.

How much money did the Plaintiffs pay for Halderman’s Red Herring Report?

Inquiring minds want to know…

Stay tuned for future PVs on the subject of paper balloting…