Republicans don’t want people of color to vote. Of course, they won’t ever say it this plainly but there is absolutely no doubt that this is the case. That’s why they are working so hard to suppress our votes whenever and wherever they can. In Georgia, this is particularly an issue—since the state’s own Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, has vowed to work with Trump’s voter fraud commission to share voter information. But it doesn’t stop there. Kemp and his office are being sued for cutting off voter registration early, thereby reducing the amount of time that people have to register to vote in federal elections. This week, another piece of that case came to light as it turns out that a computer server related to the state’s election system was erased just days after the lawsuit against Kemp and his office was filed.
A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned.
The server’s data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system. The data wipe was revealed in an email sent last week from an assistant state attorney general to plaintiffs in the case that was later obtained by the AP. More emails obtained in a public records request confirmed the wipe.
The lawsuit was filed on July 3rd and the server was wiped on July 7th. Coincidence? Hardly. Although, no one seems to know who authorized the wipe least of all Kemp. He’s putting the blame on the elections center at Kennesaw State University. The university says this was nothing more than “standard operating procedure.” But they too seem baffled at the question of who signed off on this—even though they directly report to Kemp.
The Kennesaw elections center answers to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, a Republican running for governor in 2018 and the suit’s main defendant. His spokeswoman issued a statement Thursday saying his office had neither involvement nor advanced warning of the decision. It blamed “the undeniable ineptitude” at the Kennesaw State elections center.
After declining comment for more than 24 hours, Kennesaw State’s media office issued a statement late Thursday attributing the server wiping to “standard operating procedure.” It did not respond to the AP’s question on who ordered the action.
Kemp wants to be the state’s next governor but he’s pretty ill-equipped for the job he currently holds. Not only is he working with Trump to actively make sure certain Georgians (read people of color) can’t vote, it also seems that there were huge security breaches in the servers he was responsible for. These went unnoticed for months and means that hackers could have tampered with election results.
A 180-page collection of Kennesaw State emails, obtained Friday by the Coalition for Good Governments via an open records search, details the destruction of the data on all three servers and a partial and ultimately ineffective effort by Kennesaw State systems engineers to fix the main server’s security hole.
As a result of the failed effort, sensitive data on Georgia’s 6.7 million voters — including Social Security numbers, party affiliation and birthdates — as well as passwords used by county officials to access elections management files remained exposed for months. [..]
Based on his review of the emails, [Logan Lamb, a security researcher] believes that electronic polling books could have been altered in Georgia’s biggest counties to add or drop voters or to scramble their data. Malicious hackers could have altered the templates of voting machine memory cards to skew results. An attacker could even have potentially modified “ballot-building” files to corrupt the outcome, said Lamb, who works at Atlanta-based security firm Bastille Networks.
Brian Kemp poses a dangerous threat to the people of Georgia and should not be trusted to become the state’s next governor. This is why Democrat Stacey Abrams, who has a long history of working to preserve voting rights and register voters, is the obvious choice in this governor’s race. Don’t let Kemp and the Republicans continue their work to marginalize voters of color and keep the state red. Donate $3 to Stacey Abrams’s campaign to help her turn the state blue and become Georgia’s—and America’s—first black woman governor!