'Tough noogies': Georgia secretary of state slammed after blowing off worries about voting system bugs

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is under fire from cybersecurity experts after he dismissed the results of an audit that found bugs and vulnerabilities in the state's voting equipment, Politico reported Friday.

"In a letter sent to state lawmakers last week, Raffensperger argues that a newly unsealed audit finding that there are dangerous vulnerabilities in Georgia’s widely used voting machine software is overblown and no fixes are needed," reported John Sakellariadis. "'It’s more likely that I could win the lottery without buying a ticket' than that hackers flip enough votes to swing the election, he says in the letter."

Raffensperger, a Republican, was famously targeted by former President Donald Trump in 2020, in a phone call where Trump demanded he "find" extra votes to give him the state, which President Joe Biden carried. He refused to do so.

"But Raffensperger’s dismissive reaction to the unsparing audit conducted by security expert Alex Halderman has turned him into an object of intense criticism from cybersecurity specialists, who say he is painting legitimate research with the brush of far-right conspiracy theories — and imperiling the 2024 elections in the process," said the report.

"'Raffensperger has lumped us with the election deniers,' said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and an expert on election technology. 'But we cannot, out of fear of that confusion, stop talking about these vulnerabilities. They are real, they are there, and they must be addressed.'"

A spokesman for Raffensperger reacted dismissively to the criticism, saying, “If the PhDs don’t like being put in the same category as the Pillow salesman, tough noogies. They should stop saying similar things.”

The audit found nine security vulnerabilities in Georgia's voting equipment, including some that would potentially allow hackers to install malware on a Dominion Voting Systems ImageCastX screen that could flip votes. There is no evidence that any such tampering has occurred as of now.

Dominion was famously the subject of extensive conspiracy theories on Fox News and among right-wing activists, with some even claiming the company worked with former Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez to rig elections. The company sued Fox for defamation, which ended in a settlement of nearly $800 million.