Georgia’s Secretary of State is pushing back against a man’s claim that he “hacked” the state’s voting system.
Brad Raffensperger issued a scathing rebuke of testimony offered by J. Hutton Pulitzer during a Senate election hearing. Raffensperger called the hearing “disinformation filled” and referred to Pulitzer, formerly J. Jovan Philyaw, as a “failed inventor and failed treasure hunter” masquerading as a “hacker and election security expert.”
Republicans featured Pulitzer as a star witness during the State Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Elections held Dec. 30. Pulitzer told the panel he hacked into a poll pad and went on to claim that meant the entire voting system was compromised.
State election officials say that never happened. In a statement, poll pad creator KnowInk said:
“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.”
Raffensperger warns Republicans are sowing mistrust in the electoral process by continuing to entertain voter fraud claims without evidence.
“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 Raffensperger in a press release. “These legislators need to stop calling their own reelections illegitimate and focus on getting out the vote for the January 5 elections.”
The press release made mention of Pulitzer’s invention of the CueCat, which the Secretary of State’s office noted was listed as one of the “25 worst tech products of all time” by PC World.
Pulitzer later defended his technology in a Facebook video, claiming that it “became the number one peripheral add-on to a computer in history.”
