Misty Hampton, an election supervisor in rural Georgia, never trusted the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. So she had no issue allowing someone who believed in a similar conspiracy theory into her election offices to potentially compromise voting equipment. And that ain’t all of it.
Hampton openly revealed to The Washington Post that she willingly allowed Scott Hall, a Big Lie advocate and CEO of Anytime Bail Bonding in Griffin, Georgia, into her election offices to prove “that this election was not done true and correct.”
Hampton also recorded a video of the Dominion Voting System machines used in Coffee County, Georgia, in order to show that they could be manipulated. The video went viral, opening up questions about the security of the system. The password for the server was written on a Post-it Note and stuck to the computer—visible to anyone viewing the video.
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Hampton told the Post that while she did allow Hall to enter the premises in order to help investigate results Hampton found dubious, she knows Hall did not go into the room that housed the county’s touch screen voting machines. She says she doesn’t know if he visited the room where the election management system server lived (the primary computer used to tally the county’s votes). “I’m not a babysitter,” she told the Post.
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Hampton said that not only was she never given instructions from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office on protocols about the public’s ability to access voting equipment barring a court order, but she also didn’t understand why the public couldn’t access the equipment.
“I don’t see why anything that is dealing with elections is not open to the public...Why would you want to hide anything?” Hampton asked.
During a board meeting following the 2020 elections, the Coffee County official began doubting Biden’s win. Hampton, known then as Misty Martin, claimed she may have scanned the same batch of 50 ballots twice, and an investigation was launched into the election office.
According to the Post, the meeting between Hall and Hampton was uncovered during a federal lawsuit filed by the Coalition for Good Governance against the offices of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Part of the suit focuses on a three-minute recorded phone call with a man identified as Hall. In the call, Hall spoke with Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance. Marks tells the Post she recorded the call after Hall admitted to collecting confidential legal files related to the case against Raffensperger’s office.
The Post reports that in the call, Hall told Marks that he’s “the guy who hired a jet” to fly people to Coffee County to “inspect all of those computers,” and was with them as they “went in there and imaged every hard drive of every piece of equipment,” as well as ballots. “We basically had the entire elections committee there… And they said: ‘We give you permission. Go for it.’” No report of that investigation led by Hall was ever given to Marks or anyone at Coffee County elections, according to the Post.
Ernestine Thomas-Clark, who is chair of the five-member elections board and its only Democrat, told the Post that she never gave permission to anyone to scan data from the machines.
Hampton told the Post that Eric Chaney, another one of the five board members, sat with her and Hall on the day Hall’s team arrived at the offices. In fact, she gave the Post text messages she sent to Chaney in which she mentions Hall’s name and a conversation about scanning “our ballots from the general election like we talked about the other day.” The next day, Chaney asked her to switch to the encrypted messaging app Signal.
The Post received an email from Chaney, forwarded from Coffee County attorneys, denying that Chaney knew Hall and further denying that he was in the offices while someone “illegally accessed the server or the room in which it is contained.” As for the text messages to Chaney from Hampton, he wrote: “I have no personal recollection of what you’re asking.”
In February 2021, Hampton resigned from her elections position. She was accused of falsifying time sheets, according to the Post. Hampton claims she was ousted over her viral video of the Dominion machines.
In May 2021, her replacement, James Barnes, emailed Raffensperger’s office to report that he found a business card from Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, at Hampton’s desk.
“I think it might be prudent to see if there has been any contact between the person on the card and anyone in your office and/or if they have had access to any of your equipment,” Chris Harvey, the Georgia director of elections at the time, told Barnes.
Hampton told the Post she doesn’t remember the reason Logan came to her office.
Logan was the lead contractor in the Arizona Senate’s self-styled “audit,” which used funds raised from pro-Trump and “Stop the Steal” groups to pay for his investigations, which ultimately turned up nothing.
In a podcast interview last year, Logan said he was in Georgia in an attempt to get data from the county’s Dominion machines but was unsuccessful, according to the AZ Mirror.
The Post reports that in June 2021, state officials replaced the server in the Coffee County elections office. The explanation from Raffensperger’s attorneys was that the server was compromised after a former elections official changed the password, so no one was able to operate the machine.