A Dispiriting Look at Georgia’s Election System

The following is from an excerpt from an incredibly important article by Richard DeMillo, the Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Professor of Computing, professor of management, and executive director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The article titled, “Georgia’s Election System Can’t Be Trusted” was published by Bloomberg News. Take a look:

Georgia’s aging, vulnerable, unverifiable, mismanaged, electronic voting machines are famously insecure. They’ve been hacked dozens of times, most recently at last summer’s DEFCON 25 Hacker convention in Las Vegas, where a group with little experience in voting technology gained complete control over how Georgia’s voting machines register and store votes.

Even the tech center that manages state machines has been breached. It was discovered in March 2017 that sensitive voter data, passwords and software had been exposed to possibly millions of unauthorized users. Despite agreement among U.S. intelligence services that Russian hacking represents a severe threat, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp has shown little interest in election security, dismissing threats as “fake news.”

Yet those aren’t the main reasons I mistrust the system.

Also, the following is from an excerpt from the article ‘Doug Jones’s Victory in Alabama Has Democrats Optimistic About the South’, by Zaid Jilani writing for the Intercept. Continue reading here:

The Republican Party has effectively controlled Georgia since the 2002 elections, when the long Democratic streak born in the post-Reconstruction era ended. Republicans hold a near supermajority in the legislature and every single statewide seat. Georgia’s House had the highest number of uncontested seats of any state in the country in 2016.

But there are signs that that is changing. Take, for instance, the case of Jon Ossoff’s run for Congress in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District. Although Ossoff was ultimately unsuccessful, he narrowly lost a district that had been in Republican hands since 1978 — when Newt Gingrich took office there.