By Gary Dy and Allen Zhong
Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, an Internet guru and inventor, said on Wednesday that his hacker team got access to polling systems in Georgia through a poll pad.
Pulitzer told the senators that his team was able to hack into the voting system and has documented evidence to prove it. He alleged the machines were connected to the Internet and two-way communications were occurring in real-time during a hearing on election and voter fraud held by the Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Dec. 30.
“At this very moment at a polling location in the county, not only do we now have access through the devices to the poll pad—the system—but we are in.” Jovan Pulitzer told the senate committee.
“It’s receiving data and sending data, should never happen, shouldn’t be WiFi,” Pulitzer said.
Georgia’s secretary of state did not respond to a request for comment, but released a “fact-check” statement on their official page, calling Pulitzer a “failed treasure hunter” who “provided no evidence during the Senate hearing” for his claim.
“Fake news is hard enough to combat when mainstream media outlets push it out, but when a small cadre of Georgia legislators do it, it’s a whole different story,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Pulitzer further alleged during a live-streamed video posted on Thursday, that a “cheap Chinese smart TV with WiFi” that sits next to the voting machine “is basically sucking up all that data that it can take out this place” and “pumping that data back and forth all the time.”
“So if legal votes are supposed to be there and it’s supposed to be counted, and it’s supposed to be secured, and it’s supposed to be real, why in the hell is the TV in a two-way current dialog with China?” Pulitzer asked.
The Secretary of State of Georgia admitted in their statement, that poll pads are connected to the Internet so the poll workers “can download updated voter lists,” but they are “the only piece” “hooked up to the Internet or connected to devices that are hooked up to the Internet,” and “the Wifi capability is disabled before the poll pads are put in to use at the polling place.”
Georgia secretary of state’s office also said that printers and tabulating scanners are “air-gapped” with the poll pad so they can’t be connected to the Internet.
Pulitzer did not detail the brand or manufacturer of the poll pad in his testimony.
The statement from the secretary of state linked to a statement from poll pad creator Knowink that read: “The assertions made about unauthorized access to our systems are patently false. The man claiming that someone ‘got into’ our systems did not happen according to our forensic analysis. There was no ‘hack,’ there was no ‘back door’ entry, there was no ‘pump and dump,’ and there was no access through a ‘thermostat’ located hundreds of miles away in Savannah.”
However, an evaluation report released by the Pennsylvania Department of State on Sept. 16, 2020, stated that the Knowink poll pad EPB [Electronic Poll Book, a version of Knowink] system is “vulnerable to hacking attempts, possibly compromising the integrity of check-in data and/or allowing unauthorized access to voter data” if a networked environment is activated.
Knowink did not respond to a request for comment.
