There is no need to win over the people when you have decided you’ve already won the election.
By Sarah Kendzior
de Correpndent (11/10/17)
On July 3, a group of Georgia voters filed a lawsuit against state officials following the discovery that their voting machines were deeply vulnerable to hackers and had possibly been breached.
This information was not news to the sued officials: a cybersecurity expert had discovered and reported breaches in August 2016, and even more vulnerabilities were reported in March 2017 – but nothing was done to fix them. Instead, elections were held in Georgia with ostensibly faulty equipment, making the results of both the November 2016 election and a high-profile special congressional election in June 2017 questionable.
Were Georgia’s elections compromised?
When an autocrat is in power, and basic voting rights are being eroded in a myriad of ways, free and fair elections next year are far from certain.
We will never know, because on July 7, 2017, a computer server critical to the lawsuit was destroyed. It’s not clear who ordered the data wipe, but it occurred on the watch of Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a defendant in the lawsuit and a Republican running for governor in 2018. And it makes any forensic investigation of the machines now impossible.
The Georgia election server attack barely made the news – distracted as we were by nuclear threats, treasonous officials, and neo-Nazi rallies – but this quiet scandal is both a devastating reminder of unanswered questions about the 2016 election and a harbinger of threats to come.
A democracy or an elected dictatorship?
These threats range from unanswered questions about the integrity of voting equipment to the implementation of laws designed to disenfranchise voters and predetermine election outcomes. They signal a president and party all too willing to undermine American democracy in order to retain power, creating in effect an elected dictatorship.
Though multiple officials have stated that Russian hackers did not affect the actual vote tallies, there has never been a comprehensive forensic examination to prove whether that is indeed the case.
Conflicting information about the 2016 Russia cyber hacks has been slowly leaked over the past year, with Bloomberg reporting in June 2017 that 39 states were targeted by hackers, and the Department of Homeland Security notifying 21 of those states in September 2017 – but refusing to say if the Russian election hacks were successful, and if so, to what degree. Notably, in an August 2016 public statement, then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid urged FBI Director James Comey to go public about Russia’s “intent to falsify election results.”
In other words, questions about the ability of hackers to penetrate election systems arose long before Trump won. But the American public has never received clear answers about what happened – and when citizens tried to get them in Georgia, the evidence was destroyed. …