Is anyone going to say it?
First off, we have a real f-ing problem. Georgia’s special election is not at all secure.
Georgia’s aging election system has flaws that could be exploited if a malicious hacker ever breached it, experts say. It’s a fear that has escalated with regular news reports about alleged attempts by Russian hackers to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, an issue raised again last week by the release of a leaked National Security Agency document.
At the very least, Georgia could and should have run a technical review of the entire system to check for cyber penetration or add preventive measures to protect against attacks. Thus far, they have refused to do so.
The state says all machines are tested at least five times around elections to show they are working properly and accurately. That’s important, since the operating software used to run the machines is Windows 2000 — software no longer supported by Microsoft.
Now, you might say I’m just being an alarmist.
It’s not like the state’s voting machine data was hacked.
Yeah, well, except ... this ...
A cybersecurity researcher named Logan Lamb tried to test the state’s election security by investigating Georgia’s Kennesaw State University Center for Elections Systems, which tests and programs the entire state’s voting machines. Lamb wrote an automated script for their website.
What he got was 15 gigabytes of a Russian hacker’s wet dream:
Within the mother lode Lamb found on the center’s website was a database containing registration records for the state’s 6.7 million voters; multiple PDFs with instructions and passwords for election workers to sign in to a central server on Election Day; and software files for the state’s ExpressPoll pollbooks — electronic devices used by pollworkers to verify that a voter is registered before allowing them to cast a ballot. There also appeared to be databases for the so-called GEMS servers. These Global Election Management Systems are used to prepare paper and electronic ballots, tabulate votes and produce summaries of vote totals.
The files were supposed to be behind a password-protected firewall, but the center had misconfigured its server so they were accessible to anyone, according to Lamb.
Lamb did this on his freaking lunch break at work, just to see how easy it would be. It was. Now, what the hell do you think hackers paid by the Kremlin have been doing all this time?
Given what Lamb was able to do, how hard would it be (or would have been) to alter the electronic ballot definition files so that machines could be made to record votes for the wrong candidate? Georgia has no paper trail whatsoever, so an audit is impossible. Or maybe they would go with something even easier: how about deleting names from voter registration lists on the state’s ExpressPoll poll books?
That may have already occurred. Fulton County is the heart of the black community in Atlanta, and in the last presidential election, this happened:
During the presidential election last year, some voters in Georgia’s Fulton County complained that they arrived to polls and were told they were at the wrong precinct. When they went to the precinct where they were redirected, they were told to return to the original precinct. The problem was apparently a glitch in the ExpressPoll software.
Was it a glitch that only happened in the most heavily black community? Sure, maybe. But if it was a hack, there would be no way to tell, as the Politico article made clear.
The NSA report that came out already stated that sophisticated Russian hackers, with Russian military intelligence ties, targeted voting registration systems in multiple states. In Illinois, investigators found evidence that they even tried to delete and alter voter data.
The Russians hackers trying to undermine our democracy unfortunately have a strong, powerful ally—the GOP. The GOP knew about the election interference, but since Putin was backing them, decided that they were okay with it. Senate Majority Whip John Coryn said the Russian hacking was no big deal. Mitch McConnell told the FBI director to his face that he didn’t care about the hacking and if the FBI went public with it, he’d label it a partisan attack.
Now he we are, at the cusp of a special election in an important election in Georgia, of all places.
At least six months ago, we had people who cared about democracy in some positions of power. Right now, we have a Justice Department under Jeff Sessions, a nation under Trump, and the state party in Georgia run by a lunatic fringe of the GOP.
How exactly am I supposed to feel confident with this special election?
Georgia hasn’t made any moves to allay concerns. In fact, Georgia was the only state to turn down an offer from the Department of Homeland Security to scan its voting systems for hackers ahead of last year’s presidential elections. When Logan Lamb went to the executive director of the Center for Elections Systems with all of the problems that he had found, he was threatened:
“He said, It would be best if you were to drop this now,” Lamb recalls. King also said that if Lamb did talk, “the people downtown, the politicians … would crush” Lamb.
Every major Democratic politician should be sounding the alarm. It’s a hell of a lot harder to steal an election if there’s a united front to say that we are watching and watching closely. We might not be able to stop a shady group of characters and a complicit GOP from stealing the election, but all I’m arguing is that we don’t have to make it so damn easy for them.