It's not enough to rely on voter suppression alone for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. The Republican, who previously served as secretary of state and oversaw his own very hinky win in 2018, has a bill before him to overhaul the state's voting systems. The machines the state proposes to purchase have been shown to be vulnerable to hacking.
Last year a federal judge said that the existing paperless touchscreen machines were so easy to hack that they posed a risk to Georgians' "constitutional interests." So the Republican-led legislature was tasked with finding a replacement system, and came up with one that cybersecurity experts and election integrity advocates say is at least as bad. It's another electronic system that transmits voters' selections onto a barcode on a piece of paper. Security experts say the machines are easy to hack and the barcodes easily altered. The alternative, they argue, should be paper ballots that are marked by hand, leaving a permanent record of voters' selections.
Security experts testified against the bill in committee, including Georgia Institute of Technology computer science professor Rich DeMillo, who told Politico, "The bill's sponsors made false and misleading statements during the entire legislative session in hearings leading up to the vote, often flatly contradicting objective evidence or mischaracterizing scientific writing." There's Republicans' well-known allergy to science, facts, and objective evidence at play. Such as Republican Sen. Greg Dolezal, who said the "hackability" of various voting systems was "uniform," so the one they landed on was as good as any other. That is, of course, demonstrably bullshit. Hand-marked paper ballots are not hackable. "Hacking and configuration errors cannot cause pens to put the wrong votes on hand-marked paper ballots, but they can cause ballot-marking devices to print the wrong votes on the paper record," Philip Stark, a statistics professor and voting security expert at the University of California, Berkeley, points out.
"I cannot think of a legitimate reason," Stark said, "for the Legislature to spend Georgians' tax dollars on ballot-marking devices for all voters," as opposed to simply using hand-marked paper ballots. Yet the legislature plowed through this process without taking into account the uniform and unanimous opposition from actual security experts. Why? Well, that's just too predictable: The vendor it wants to give the contract to is voting technology giant Election Systems & Software. ES&S's former top lobbyist has moved to the governor's office, and is now Kemp's deputy chief of staff. What a coincidence, huh?
Democratic state Sen. Sally Harrell said on the floor during debate, "Don't let Georgia get suckered by vendors who are thirsty for the biggest contract in the United States for what is brand-new technology that might not last the 10 years that we need it to last." Which is precisely what the state is poised to do. "This process, from the SAFE Commission through the legislative process, has been driven by a foregone conclusion," Harrell told Politico. "Why take the time to understand the technology if you've already made up your mind?"