'BradCast' 8/3/2026 (Breaking: Georgia Voting System Flaw Allows Discovery of How Voters Voted; Guest: Marilyn Marks, election security advocate)

Folks in Spokane, the state's second largest city, are right now on serious alert at this hour with three major wildfires raging in the area that have so far resulted in the evacuations of some 60,000 residents and the loss of more than 600 structures last I checked, including many homes. With many more threatened, Desi Doyen. I know you've got family up there in Spokane. Everyone doing okay as far as you know up there? Yes. Yes, they're all okay. So far so good. Unfortunately, for hundreds of families, things are not okay. But officials are working very hard to make sure those folks have places to go and shelters are in place and assistance is on the way. Thousands of families, in fact. And we will see hopefully your family is okay and they won't have to. They haven't evacuated yet. They have not yet. Hopefully they don't have to. They're staring out at some huge plumes of smoke clouds out there as that continues to rage. We will, of course, be keeping our eyes on that throughout the week on the broadcast and on our Green News report. But hopefully, folks in Washington and the other states I mentioned are still able to get their ballots cast if they have not already for Tuesday's primaries this week, which, of course, we will also be following closely on this week's broadcasts. Trump's war in the Middle East, I'm sorry, his brief little excursion is now entering its sixth month with Donald Trump claiming again over the weekend that he was very close. to a breakthrough agreement with Iran. Iran, however, says there is no direct negotiations with the U.S. ongoing. The truth of Trump's latest decision to hold back on attacks largely against Iran over the weekend is likely closer to the fact that Trump's incredibly ill-considered war has left the U.S. without enough defensive missiles at this point. to protect against Iran's counter-attacks and, of course, his continued manipulation of the stock market, which seems to fall for his false claims about pending agreements time and time again. He spent the weekend, in addition to playing golf, raging over the fact that his own U.S. attorney in D.C., Fox News's Janine Piro, conceded that his reflecting pool project was damaged not by vandals. But by a botched installation of the liner that Trump installed before the nation's 250th anniversary last month. And as we had warned you on show after show last week, Republican senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina were only pretending to oppose the nomination of Trump's personal defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, as U.S. Attorney General. Yes, as we...

warned you, they quickly folded on Monday in their pretend insistence that Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund that he's given himself for January 6 criminals, and yes, for himself, as those senators had insisted that that fund be dissolved and also their pretend objection to the unprecedented IRS immunity. that Trump has given himself and his family and his company. And yes, they are still in line to receive some $100 million. $100 million in waived IRS tax penalties. That all comes out of your pocket, of course, despite some vague promises on Monday from Todd Blanche. We may get to more of that later on today's show, almost certainly later this week, and or we may get to some of your calls if time allows, if you have any questions or concerns about what we are about to break here on this show. At 818-9855735, and because we are in Fund Drive here for one more week at KPFK, my flagged. station in Los Angeles. You will need to hit button number one when you call in 818985 KPFK to join me on the air personally or preferably hit button number two to donate to KPFK to help support this station to continue airing shows like the broadcast, including our breaking news that you will hear first. And well, then maybe elsewhere. To that end today, How valuable do you think it might be to someone like Donald Trump's Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to know exactly how people at his military bases in Georgia voted in the 2024 election or in this year's primary elections back in May. As Pete Hegseth continues, his rampage of removing folks from the top military ranks who are not... regarded as loyal enough to the regime. How valuable would it be to someone like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. to know how people at the CDC, which is based in Atlanta, Georgia, how they voted in 2024 or even how they voted in this year's critical upcoming midterms. Or even in the primaries, just a couple of months ago there in Georgia. How valuable might it be for Georgia's new governor, whoever it might be there? Current governor, Brian Kemp, he is termed out, so there will be either a new Republican or Democratic governor next year in the Peach State. How valuable would it be for them to know how specific voters voted? As the new governor will have to fill some 4,000 appointments next year with the new term. How valuable might it be for him or her to know exactly how their potential appointments voted in this year's midterms? Did they vote for or against whoever that new governor might be?

Back in 2022, during a long-running lawsuit against Georgia's horrible, 100% unverifiable, incredibly vulnerable, and insecure touchscreen voting system made by a company named Dominion voting systems. and used at every polling place in the state, the good government nonprofit named Coalition for Good Governance was allowed to have their own computer scientist voting system experts examine Georgia's voting system ahead of their trial in that case. Among the many flaws and vulnerabilities that was discovered in those systems at the time, including the fact that their touchscreen systems in Georgia could be hacked by a single person with a single pen at any polling place? Along with that was the fact that the company, it was discovered, had used a flawed, long ago cracked so-called random numbering algorithm to track the order of ballots scanned by each voter at each polling place. That security flaw could allow a very dedicated individual. or a group of individuals to try and figure out how each voter voted at a polling place. If they were able to take millions of pieces of data and determine the order that people voted because this algorithm had already been cracked, it would be a very big task, but it was doable and it was alarming. To the voting system experts who had discovered that Dominion had been using a so-called random number algorithm, which was not really random at all that had actually been cracked decades ago back in the 1970s in order to try and obscure the order of ballots that were cast at each polling place. We reported on a number of those flaws that were discovered back in 2022 and 2023 on this program at the time as discovered by the experts in the coalition's lawsuit against the state of Georgia seeking to decertify the voting system that is used across the entire state at the order of Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. At the time, we were joined, as we have been many times over the years on this program, by the founder of the Coalition for Good Governance, Marilyn Marks. Long-time listeners will likely recognize her name. She's been with us dozens of times over the years, often here to break rather troubling stories on Georgia's voting systems. Today is no exception.

Marilyn Marks, for example, is the woman who discovered the breach beginning back on January 7, 2021 by a group of Trump supporters of the computerized voting and tabulation systems in Coffee County, Georgia. She discovered that breach, which would eventually lead to the criminal indictments of at least four Trump allies, including folks like Sidney Jerome Powell, who helped organize the coffee county breach that Marilyn discovered. In the massive conspiracy indictment that was brought against Trump and 19 co-conspirators at the time, about four of them or more were related to this Coffey County breach. Marx discovered that breach, which also threatened future elections not just across the entire state of Georgia, but also in 21 states and Puerto Rico and D.C. where the same systems are also used. When she was contacted by one of the organizers of that scheme, and had the wherewithal to turn on a recording device to record some of that phone call. We played it many times on this show over the years after being the first broadcast outlet in the nation to do so. But here's a bit of that call by way of reminder when you will hear Atlanta businessman Scott Hall who eventually pleaded guilty in this matter and Marilyn Marks, to whom Hall essentially confesses to the crime that he helped the other Trumpers to pull off. You know, I'm the guy that chartered the jet to go down to Coffey County to have them inspect all of those computers. And they scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives. They imaged the hard drives? Yes. How in the world did you get permission to do that? We basically had the entire elections committee there. Okay. And they said, we give you permission. Go for it. So that was just one of many stories that the great Merrill Marx has surfaced over the years coming out of Georgia regarding its terribly insecure voting system. So back to that random number vulnerability I mentioned that could reveal the secret ballots. of voters across the peach state and exactly how they voted to someone who might be able to stitch together millions of pieces of data in order to do so. That was just one of the many vulnerabilities discovered by Maryland's computer experts in her lawsuit against the state at the time back in 2022 and 23 when a number of those vulnerabilities were discovered and reported to both the company and federal officials. By the voting system scientists in the case, the company, Dominion, announced a security patch that was issued and said to have taken care of at least some of those security vulnerabilities that were discovered. As we reported at the time, SISA, the U.S. cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, part of the Homeland Department of Homeland Security, which Donald Trump has by and large dismantled. SISA. At the time, they issued an urgent memo in response to all of this, recommending that all jurisdictions using these particular voting system machines patch their systems right away for security vulnerabilities immediately. That was back before the 2024 presidential election. I think it was back in 2023.

But Marilyn Marks joined us on the broadcast at the time to reveal that the Secretary of State's office in their lawsuit against the state had told the court that they would not, in fact, be patching their voting systems until after the 2024 presidential election. That alone was a huge story that we originally broke on this program with Maryland. And now... No doubt skipping a lot along the way. Let's move the clock forward to the July 4th weekend over this year, just a few weeks ago, when Marks discovered another alarming matter that we are breaking on this program. Today, even as I know, there are a number of corporate media outlets who are likely to run their own stories on this shortly. At least I hope they do. Over the July 4th weekend, if I am understanding it all correctly, and Marilyn will be here momentarily to correct me, if not, she was able to take publicly available... So-called cast vote records. Those are the essentially the spreadsheets for how each person voted in each precinct, but it does not include the person's name or identity, just how they voted in each of the various races on the ballot. She was able to take those cast vote records or CVRs and feed them into an artificial intelligence chatbot. In Maryland's case, she used chat GPT, which I'm sure many of you used yourself on your own computer or on your phone. Along with that information, which identified voters only by this long ago cracked so-called random number sequence. added to each person's ballot to help keep it anonymized. Along with that information that is put onto their ballots when they scan their computer printed ballot and the precinct ballot scanner, which tabulates the ballot, along with that information, she was able to feed ChatGPT. A copy of the publicly available records from Georgia's electronic polling books, which show who voted, where they voted, and what exact time they voted. She fed those documents obtained all of them via public records request. Into-chat GPT, along with one more piece of information, an old blog item at a computer security website, explaining how that long ago cracked random number generator can be, yes, easily decoded to reveal the actual order in which voters voted.

And with those three pieces of publicly available information, if I'm understanding this correctly, in a matter of minutes, chat GPT was able to reveal to her how just about every voter voted in the state of Georgia in the 2024 presidential election, in the recent May primaries in the state. And how they voted for every office on every ballot. So much for the secret ballot. At least in Georgia, as long as one has publicly available documents and access to a consumer-level AI chatbot like chat GPT or Claude or co-pilot. And again, how much might it be worth? for the new incoming Georgia governor to know how everyone in the state voted before filling 4,000 positions in the next state administration. How much would Pete Hegseth like to know how every single military official in Georgia voted? Would Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. like to know how everyone who works at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta voted in 2024 or this year in the midterm elections? If you have noticed by now, This is a very alarming story and one that I suspect or at least hope you will be hearing more about elsewhere in the days ahead. But today we are privileged to be joined once again by our friend who was recently described by a reporter as the Forrest Gump of Georgia elections because when something terrible is revealed there. Marilyn Marks seems to curiously be at the center of it somehow. Marilyn Marks, a long time expert advocate for free and fair and secure elections as executive director of the nonpartisan coalition for good governance joins us now. Welcome back to the broadcast, Marilyn. Do we have you there? I am now. There you go. Okay. Hi. Thank you so much. First, I just want to make sure there, Marilyn, did I explain what you discovered over the Fourth of July weekend? Explain it accurately in general in my attempt to sort of make it to explain it as simply as possible? Yes, unfortunately, yes. I would say that on the 4th of July, and even up until today, I have certainly not had ChatGPT try to connect voters on all of the voters in their ballots. I started out with a county or two to test the ability to do it, and not that I wanted to see how anyone voted, and not that I am looking up their ballots. I want to explain in a minute why I was even... doing such an exercise. But I have not disclosed to anyone what ChatGPT came up with in terms of that linkage.

But let me explain what I was doing. Okay. And before you do, let me just say, you don't have to explain how other people were voting or sharing any of that information because apparently this can be done or at least has been, you know, can be done by anyone. I know you've now had a number of computer scientists, which are not actually confirmed that they were able to do the same thing. We'll get to that in a little bit. But please go ahead with how you discuss. this by yourself, just feeding the data into chat GPT? Right. And as you know, Brad, and maybe your listeners know, I don't know the first thing about coding. If a line of code walked across my desk, I wouldn't recognize it. But I do know my way around the public records in Georgia. And what happened was that the state election board is considering a rule that would require the Secretary of State to make the damn patch, the patch that has gone for four years without being made. And so I wanted to sign. They said, by the way, they were going to, Brad Raffensperger's people in your court case, said that they were going to apply that patch, just not before the presidential election in 2024. They were going to do it afterwards. Are you saying they have still not applied that patch to their system? and they have no intention of doing so. As Alex Holderman told people some time ago, it's going to take the Secretary of State longer to apply this little patch than it took the Americans to defeat the Nazis in World War II. Alex Alderman, of course, the computer scientist, infamous, notorious white hat hacker from the University of Michigan, a Ph.D. and he's, you know, been an expert on countless such systems and cases. How long did it take to, how long did it take ChatGPT to give it that information and to sort of sort out this? long ago, broke in random number algorithm and then put the ballots in the order that they were actually cast in each precinct in the state so that you could then compare them to the order that people voted. Again, I was just doing it in a county or two to start with. And I did it on. small county or two, and it took minutes, maybe 15 minutes, but that was with my fumbling around of, you know, trying to be sure I'd uploaded the records right. It started churning away and really in just a matter of minutes, it would produce a county and say, okay, I've linked to these ballot numbers with the voters. And of course, those ballot numbers should have never been linkable. They should have never been a predictable number. And the problem is certainly not with the fact that the data is being released. It should be released, of course, for transparent elections. The data of the results and who voted and so forth. Exactly. Fast vote records that show ballot by ballot. Each ballot has a record number. And the problem is that that record number is predictable because the wrong...

pseudo-random number formula was used. But anyway, the get back to why I was even doing this. I certainly wasn't looking for how anyone voted, but the state election board has a rule that it is trying to propose, or at least some members are trying to propose, and it is pending right now public comment. I was getting ready to write our public comment, and I wanted to make certain that nothing had changed in the software over these four years that nothing had changed before I put my name on anything, saying, yeah, yeah, this is a real problem, which we think it is. And I did kind of one or two of them hunt and pack, and I thought, you know, this would be so much easier if I have a little software called a friend of mine who's a software engineer. And I said, can you help me with this? And he goes, it's 4th of July weekend. You've got to be kidding me. No, go away. And I was so frustrated because I wanted to do it right then. And I thought, well, I think chat GPT is supposed to be good at coding. And I'm not. Let me try. And a few minutes later, I was completely nauseated with what I saw. I knew it was accurate. I could tell it was accurate. And then I tried a few more counties in a few more counties. And then Brad, the next thing I did was I reached out to Professor Andrew Pell, who, you know, of course, is a longtime friend of your show and of the election integrity, the election security movement. And I told him what I had discovered, and he said, let me put you in touch with one of our Princeton experts. And he put me in touch with Max Springer, who's postdoc. And his area of expertise in studies, a research fellow, is AI. And we quickly began to work on this together. I knew that I was in a realm that was outside of any little bit of expertise I had. And I got Max involved, and he quickly saw the problem. And quickly was able to... Well, he decided what his thesis was going to be was, hey, look, it doesn't take an expert like me, Max Springer, that someone like Maryland with no skills whatsoever encoding anything can take a commonly available tool at almost no cost and dangerously get the system to produce how people voted. And he began to do a little bit of research. And within a matter of hours had taken, I had just done a little handful of counties. He did 139 counties in no time flat. And you basically, all you did was share, essentially, your findings told him how you did it. Oh, you had the Castle Records. You had the, you didn't tell him that. No, and in fact what we decided to do was we decided that it was important to keep our methodology separate Because because I all I shared with him were how to get to the Georgia public records Okay, we decided I wasn't going to tell him how I was doing it He wasn't going to tell me how he was doing it He was going to just see what he could get as someone who didn't know a darn thing about Georgia or the voting system

or the election records, he took the blog post that Alex Holderman and Drew Springall and Braden Clements had put up back in 2022. Regarding how to, regarding how this algorithm has already been broken is already a security vulnerability at that point, but in order to. Use that algorithm. We take a lot of work. You'd have to put thousands of man hours, basically, to try to use it to stitch back together, the order in which people voted in Georgia in order to figure out how they voted. It was already a vulnerability, but it was not the type of vulnerability that it has since been discovered to be, thanks to AI, that anybody can use just a regular old retail chatbot. Right. And so that was what he was going to set out to prove that it didn't make an expert like a Halderman or Springer himself to do this, that just your average common tools, you could do this. Within a few hours, he had proven it to an alarming level. And today, he posted a blog. I guess you're going to talk about that, Brad. Yeah, actually, there's a great quote that I want to read from this. This is Max Springer, computer. scientist, a PhD postdoctoral research fellow is actually what he is. He's in Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. He posted about this exploit just an hour or two before airtime here. And here's one of his quotes from his piece, quote, I am not a security researcher, and I have never been to Georgia. Yet, within a few hours, using AI tools, and nothing but public records, I was able to reconstruct the order in which one and a half million ballots were cast in Georgia's May 26 primary. 98.9% of the in-person ballots from this order and the state's public logs. He writes, I can target specific counties and ask the AI to exactly identify how any person voted. In some of Georgia's counties, I can determine the exact ballot cast by every voter at the vote center's ballot secrecy is entirely lost. That's Max Springer confirming your findings, Marilyn Marks. It's absolutely... chilling, it seems to me. It is chilling. And then it's one thing for the two of us to be telling people about this. When you see it on a screen, it is absolutely nauseating. I can't tell you how just devastating and scary it is to actually be seeing this data pop up in front of you. And, you know, names of people I know.

ballot. You know, their names come up and it tells me what the record link is. But so, you know, yes, it is very, very serious and obviously we do not have ballot secrecy in Georgia. And I hope you will tell your listeners how to get to that blog piece. Well, I will, but let me do this because I got more questions for you. Can you stick around a little bit here? If I take a break and come back to you. All right, because I got a lot more questions about, you know, I mentioned a few ways in which this information could be misused by somebody like Pete Hegseth or whoever the new governor is or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., etc. But that is really. just the tip of the iceberg. It is not just folks like that. It's actually sort of everyday people in everyday life in Georgia who's, well, who really could be put at danger from this. So let me take a quick break. We will come back. I've got to get to a pledge break, Marilyn. We will come back very shortly. Ask you more about that. Ask you more about what the governor's office. says they are going to do now, as I said, just 90 days out from the critical midterm elections, if they're going to allow this to happen again. If so, why? You know, what does the courts say? Lots to talk about with Marilyn Mark's breaking news once again today. We will come back with her and pick up right there. I am Brad Friedman, and you are listening to the broadcast.

You're listening to the American Democracy Minute, keeping your government buy on for the people. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger announced July 31st that she has restored the voting and civil rights to over 66,000 formerly incarcerated citizens since she took office in January. Virginia is only one of three states where withholding those rights remains in the state constitution. Abigail Spanberger said in a statement, I'm proud that, after contending with my predecessor's efforts to deny Virginians their fundamental rights, we have restored the rights of more than 66,000 Virginians who have served their time. These Virginians deserve the right to use their vote, make their voices heard, and be recognized as contributing citizens to our Commonwealth and Country, unquote. Virginia, Iowa, and Kentucky have provisions in their constitutions which withhold voting and civil rights even after enrolled citizens have returned to society. All three states empower the governor to restore those rights. If approved, a November ballot measure, question three, would amend Virginia's constitution to automatically restore those rights upon release. The Reverend Cozy Bailey, president of the NAACP Virginia State Conference, said in a statement, voting is a fundamental right of citizenship, and every Virginian who has returned to their community deserves that right fully restored. We've linked to the governor's statement, local reporting by the Virginia Merk. and each state's policy at American Democracy Minute.org. I'm Brian Beal. Hey, this is Brad. Here at the Bradcast and Bradblog.com, we fight for election integrity all year around, like no other media outlet in the nation. But, of course, we need your help to help us remain on your public airwaves and completely independent. The fight for voting rights, civil rights, and to save our planet continues. Please help us continue that fight independently over your public airwaves by stopping by bradblog.com slash donate. From Desi Doyen and myself, thank you.

Welcome back to Bradcast, Bradfriedman from Bradblog.com. We are speaking with Marilyn Marks. We got kind of a scoop today, Marilyn Marks, founder of the Coalition for Good Governance.org, who has essentially discovered that the secret ballot... In the great state of Georgia, and maybe elsewhere, maybe as many as 21 other states that use the same Dominion voting system software scanners there, that secret ballot is no more. in the state of Georgia, at least for people who vote at the polling place, at least as her findings regarding using chat GPT with some public records, some public records request that she has received to find out how people voted at each precinct and who voted each precinct. And essentially, chat GPT is able to put that together to reveal how every single voter. who voted at the polls in Georgia in their May primary or in their presidential election in 2024 or their upcoming election, how they voted. Marilyn, I was speaking. We just took a pledge break here at KPFK. And I mentioned the fact that, well, we are breaking this story today on the air. Max Springer broke it, excuse me, broke it himself as he confirmed your findings over at Princeton's. Center for Information Technology Policy today. Why is it being broken at the Bradcast and over on Princeton's blog instead of at the Atlanta Journal Constitution or the New York Times or CBS News? Well, I hope that certainly they will follow your lead, Brad, and I feel sure that they will. But I think as I've talked to some of the major media outlets, they certainly were very concerned by it. But I will also tell you that they got very squeamish about it. It's like, how can we dare? How can we? tell people this because this is going to intimidate voters and it does this is this can this really be true and because it seems like it's creating fear and doubt and certainty right and is this really legitimate and I think that they have been awaiting

Max Springer's posting this blog, and now his findings, he didn't just confirm my limited findings. He made far greater findings, right, by being able to automate 139 counties, I guess, he tested. And so I think they've been waiting to hear from someone other than... an activist, an advocate. And now they are hearing it from a scientist, and I expect that other scientists will weigh in soon with letters to, hopefully, the state election board, the governor, the secretary of state, saying this must be addressed before the midter. Yeah, well, I mean, these concerns that they have, and I understand how, you know, you don't want to scare people out of voting and so forth, but security by obscurity does not work. Merely telling people or in this case not telling people about this problem does not make the problem go away. This problem... Was so bad that, as I mentioned in the first block, the SISA, the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency for the U.S. issued a warning saying, yes, everybody. who uses this system in about 21 states should update with this patch made by Dominion purportedly to correct this security issues and other ones. A lot of states did so at the time. This was back in 2023. The state of Georgia said, well, we're not going to update. We're not going to patch these systems until after the 2024 election. They still have not done so. But two questions on that point. Marilyn, does that patch actually solve this particular vulnerability, A, and B, why is the Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the state of Georgia, why have they not patched their systems as they said they would do after the 2024 elections? And apparently they're not patching them now before November? They don't intend to. They said it is, oh, too much trouble, too expensive. And this has kind of been their position, even though the state has an overflowing coffer spread. It's not like it's a poor state. You know, the reserves are just unbelievable, and they've been giving massive tax refunds, etc. So it's not a lack of money. It is a lack of will. And they do not intend to do anything other than... now take this information and what has been public information and no longer release it and just redact the information. You mean no longer release the cast vote records, how people voted, which we all need to be able to confirm the results that are reported and so forth. They're not going to release that information? Well, they will redact the audit trail.

from it they will redact the record number which is what's needed to have a public audit trail yeah that's not the answer though that is not the answer because what that does Brad is that leaves the insiders and their vendors with the ability to trace everyone's votes oh so it's only the government the government and the vendors who will know how you vote Now tell me about what we've just done by doing that is drive up the black market price of this information. And of course, you cannot keep it from leaks and you can't keep it from spills. Only look at Coffey County, right? Yep, they were able to get to it. When they can prevent, they can prevent this from ever being a problem by just simply doing the patch. You ask if it is effective. At this point, the experts are taking the word of Dominion, the say that this patch works, but of course Dominion and the state has not allowed anyone to look at it to determine whether it is. And one of the state election board members has asked the Secretary of State to turn over the information so that experts can look at it and the Secretary of State has refused. But at this point, they hope that there have been significant improvements with this patch. The Secretary of State simply wants the entire system. as vulnerable as it is and as unverifiable as you point out that it is left in place yet again through these midterms and oh yeah go ahead I wanted to make one other point. You had mentioned that these are experts in our case, in our curling case, that discovered this. Yes, and they discovered this not through any secret information, private information that was given to them. This was public information that some of the researchers and some of Alex Holderman students. at the time got into and discovered who did not have any access to the system or the work that our experts had done under protective order. This was all public information. The cast vote records was enough to make them look at those numbers and say, wait a minute, I think I recognize these numbers. I think I recognize this pattern. I think I recognize this algorithm that was broken. About 50 years ago, quite literally, in the 1970s. Marilyn Marks, I mentioned some reasons at the top, you know, about why this is so troubling, aside from the obvious outrage of losing our right to a secret ballot.

under the Georgia voting system in general. But there are some concerns, you know, above and beyond Pete Hegseth, seeing how members of the military voted or the new governor being able to see how residents who might be hired to be in his or her administration, how they voted. What practical problems do you see with someone being able to do this, to use chat deep GPT, essentially? to figure out how any individual person in Georgia voted at the precinct last May. I know we talked about a few of these, like in small counties. Yes. You mentioned sort of a haunting one concerning local sheriffs. Sure. If we think about Georgia, you know, it is, you know, 140 rural counties. And, you know, people know everybody. There's small communities. And, you know, the school principal and the school teachers and the sheriff and the local judges. So think about... as people live their everyday lives in these towns. Let's say the local sheriff's got a list. He can easily pull up a list of who voted for him and who voted for his opponent. And when it's time to issue a ticket for distracted driving. or answer a call at your home, he can look at his list, who's in his good list and who's his bad list. Think about what we have seen in terms of teachers being bullied about what they are teaching and being so monitored by parents. Can you imagine the bullying parents getting the list and circulating it of how the teachers in their kids' teachers are voting? Yeah. Think about, excuse me, go ahead. No, I was going to say, of course, add all of those to, of course, the standard sort of concerns about the loss of the secret ballot, an abusive husband who's able to figure out how his wife voted, an employer being able to discern how his employees voted. with, you know, little more than chat GPT in their hand or Claude or whatever, you know, tool on their phone to see exactly how they voted. I mean, it's absolutely chilling. And this follows on, by the way, the campaign in 2024 where there was an effort made by Democrats to tell voters, hey, your husband will never know how you voted. How's that looking today? Well, it would look like an unethical claim right now. And that's what I hope that the progressive voting rights organizations will seriously think about. You just cannot go out and assure voters that they have the right to a secret ballot when we know they don't.

So, or they have the right. They have the right. But right now, that right is being violated. Yeah. So clearly where we need the progressive voting rights orgs to weigh in is to demand that the secretary and the state election board fix this and fix it now. And that's in Georgia. And not quit dilly deli. And that's in Georgia. Mind you, after the coffee county breach, which you also discovered in coffee county Georgia after the Trumpers. seemingly at his order, you know, broke into the voting system down in Coffee County, Georgia, discovered how the entire system across Georgia worked. It wasn't just Georgia. As we learned at the time, there are states all over the country, jurisdictions all of the country, who use these very same voting systems like here in California. And the Coffee County breach led to some... some, let's say, pretty lively meetings, apparently with the Secretary of State, between the Secretary of State and computer software experts at the time trying to warn about... this breach and the threat that it had, do we know above and beyond Georgia, which refuses to apply the security patch that Dominion made, that the federal government is telling them they should apply? Do we know above and beyond Georgia if these systems are still unpatched, for example, here in California or elsewhere around the country? Well, my understanding is in California, they are not. They are still using, and your listeners may want to check out. They're using Democracy Suite 5.5A, which is what, or 5.10, I've forgotten which one. But anything less than, anything less than Democracy 5.17. that 5.17 is when the patch went in, anything that is older than 5.17 still has this problem. And in California, of course, you have so many mail ballots, and we should say this is not a problem for mail ballots. Mail ballots essentially shuffle themselves, right, in the mail. And there is no order in terms of we know what the order of people coming to cast their mail ballots. But for those who still vote in the polling place, It is my understanding. California has not updated their software, and somebody needs to be talking to Shirley Weber again. about this. That's our Secretary of State here, Shirley Weber, a Democrat up in Sacramento who has not, since the, really since the Coffey County breach, has not taken these concerns as seriously as I would like as seriously as other voting system, computer science experts would like folks that I have talked to. And I should make clear, we do a lot of mail ballots. You say that's not a

affected by this particular, we'll call it an exploit that happens at the polling place when you scan your ballots at the polling place. But it's... Vote by mail. I've been warning folks this year, given what Donald Trump is doing with the post office and trying to block the use of the postal service for ballots, that, yes, by all means, get a vote by mail ballot, but try to hand deliver it to a drop box or to a voting center. If you do that, it's tallied centrally. It's not tallied at a precinct. And would you recommend that? a safe way to avoid this particular issue of potentially the way you voted being exposed to anyone? Yes, it is. Particularly when your counties do a good job of keeping ballot secrecy in mind as they, you know, be sure to put your ballot in the secrecy sleeve. Don't just throw your secrecy sleeve out. Right. But put your ballot in the secrecy sleeve in most jurisdictions do a good job. of dissociating that outer envelope that has your name on it with the inner envelope and you can be assured that your ballot will be shuffled up and counted in a way that cannot connect the voter and the vote. I think that we want to definitely help people remember that no election official in the U.S. has the authority or the right to know how you vote. People tend to forget that and think, oh, it's the trusted election official. Oh, no. But in Georgia, the law is particularly strong. It says that absolute secrecy. in voting is required. And it goes on to define absolutely secret ballot. It says so that no one can know how the voter is voted. It doesn't mean that the government can know. And right now, the Secretary of State is taking the position. It's fine if the government and its vendors know. By the way, Brad, let's not forget who those vendors are. You know that a Trump-friendly organization, Scott Lundekers organization, Liberty Votes, bought Dominion. They have access to this data, their technicians do. And their sister company, Knowick, runs every single poll book that has the timestamps down to the second of every single voter who checks in in the polling place. Yep. They have... instant online real-time access to that information. And that's, by the way, that's not just, that's not just in Georgia. Those poll, those electronic poll books, they're called No Ink. And you said it was a sister company. It's really the same company. It's the same guy. It's the same company, right. Both companies. Technically, maybe his sister. It's the same company, same owners. Which makes it even easier for an official at this company, Liberty votes, to.

Compare, you know, voting records that come in from the optical scanner at the precinct to the voting records that come in on the electronic poll books side by side. It's a breeze. Nothing to it. And that's sort of a best case scenario because that would still be able to happen, I suspect, even if these machines were patched, no? No. No? If these things are patched, no. They would not be able to do it if they truly used a strong, you know, pseudom random number. They would, no, because no insiders would have this. Also, Georgia needs to quit allowing no ink to have so darn much information, PII, that they don't even have a legal right to have. So Brad, we've been warning about this. You may remember for months and months before I ever hit on the idea of testing it on ChatGPT. Because we were concerned when the knowing Dominion merger came along and knowing everything that Knowink is doing about gathering all of this information, we kept saying that combined company would have the power. to quickly mechanize this. Yep. You know, they don't need chat GPT, right? They've got an army of software engineers. And so they can use far more sophisticated tools than my $20 a month chat GPT. We've had some folks who have called in who were worried about this, hearing what you're explaining to all of us today, Marilyn Marks, understandably worried. They should be worried. They should be concerned. But I want to underscore again, if you are concerned about this. If you can vote on an absentee ballot, hopefully a handmarked paper ballot, absentee ballot, and then, as I often tell folks, deliver it in person to your precinct, to your voting center, to your county, whatever the appropriate way is in the jurisdiction that you live. That is one way to avoid this. We're going to hear a lot of stories like this. Other concerns between now and November and people, I understand that, you know, know, the caller who says, you know, I'm worried that people will be frightened to vote. Don't be frightened. Find out how to work around those problems, whatever they are, and fight like hell for your democracy. Because right now it has never been more of a threat, you know, than ever. But it's going to take all of us to do something about it. Max Springer in his... Blog item at Princeton today warns, quote, affected scanners should be corrected before the next election, not after the next headline. Such data cannot be maintained if we improperly deploy privacy algorithms and put voters at risk by the sheer act of voting. It is exactly this civic duty, he writes, that we have failed to protect.

And it is well past time that we did so, he writes. I will, of course, link to that blog post when I post today's show. But it sounds exactly right what he is saying. And Marilyn Marks, thank you for trying anyway to protect that civic duty and the private ballots now seemingly lost at least to, well, potentially millions in the great state of Georgia. because you noticed and you bothered and you gave a damn to raise holy hell about it. And I guess we're going to have to continue raising holy hell with your help, Marilyn Marks, as ever. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yes, we need to just fight to get it fixed, not hide the problem. Marilyn Marks is the founder and executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance. You can find more about them. Coalition for Good Governance.org. You can find her on the blue skies at Marilyn R. Marks. And I suspect we will be talking to her. I hope not, but I suspect we'll be talking to her much more between now and November. Marilyn, always appreciate it. Thank you so much for all you do. Thank you. All right. We have got to get out here. My thanks to our producer, Desi Doyen, to my board operator, Will, and of course, to all of you for spending a portion of your day or night with us. If you missed any portion of today's show or any other. You can download it anytime for free at bradblog.com. You can drop me email. I'm Bradcast at bradblog.com on the social media. As you will find me at the Bradblog. We will see you there until we see you here tomorrow. I'm Brad Friedman. Good luck, world.

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