Raffensperger (R) said his office would replace machines in Coffee County “to assuage fears fueled by perennial election deniers and conspiracy theorists.” He added that anyone who broke the law in connection with unauthorized access to Coffee County’s machines should be punished, “but the current election officials in Coffee County need to move forward with the 2022 election and should be able to do so without this distraction .” Some election security experts have raised concerns that copying the Coffee County software — used statewide in Georgia — risks exposing the entire state to hackers, who could use the copied software as a road map to find and exploit vulnerabilities. Raffensperger’s office has said security protocols would make it virtually impossible to tamper with votes without detection. The move comes after Raffensperger’s office spent months expressing skepticism that such a security breach ever happened in Coffee County. “There is no evidence of such a thing. It didn’t happen,” Raffensperger chief operating officer Gabe Sterling said at a public event in April. Since then, the fact that outsiders accessed county voting machines — and copied sensitive software and data — has been confirmed by affidavits, surveillance video from inside and outside the county elections office and other documents turned over to plaintiffs in long-running political lawsuits. controversies over election security in Georgia; The plaintiffs argue that the state should replace touch-screen voting machines with paper-marked ballots. Raffensperger and other Georgia officials are defendants in that case. They deny that the electoral system is insecure. The announcement said Coffee County will get new “ballot marking devices,” the touch-screen voting machines that voters use to make their choices. printers for voter choice paper ballots. ballot scanners used in precincts; electronic polling pads used to check voters at polling stations. and flash cards and thumb drives. Two pieces of equipment accessed by coroners in Coffee County — a central ballot scanner and the election management system server used to count results — had already been replaced by Raffensperger’s office in June 2021. Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Government, a plaintiff in the civil suit, said leaving those two pieces of equipment in place is “extremely ineffective.” They have been used during the election with the “potentially infected” devices now being replaced and could now be infected themselves, he said. Before the announcement, Susan Greenhalgh, senior election security adviser for the nonprofit Free Speech for People and an expert advisor for the Coalition for Good Governance, said replacing the machines in Coffee County is necessary but not sufficient for the limiting the risk of election security in Georgia. “You still have the general problem that the software has been released into the wild to countless people who may have bad intent and who may be using it to find ways to manipulate elections,” Greenhalgh told reporters at a news briefing earlier this week. . . The video shows a team from Atlanta-based SullivanStrickler spent about eight hours at the county elections office on Jan. 7, 2021, copying software from Dominion Voting Systems equipment and data from multiple memory sticks and other devices. The county’s then-superintendent of elections told The Washington Post earlier this year that he allowed the team into the office to help find evidence that the election “wasn’t done true and right.” The video also shows Cathy Latham, then the county Republican Party chairwoman, greeting the SullivanStrickler team at the polls office and introducing them to local officials. Her lawyers have denied she was involved in the January 7 copying or that she did anything improper or illegal. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said it is investigating a suspected computer hack into a Coffee County election server that day. A special judicial commission in Atlanta, which was already looking into the “fake electors” scheme to keep President Donald Trump in office by using fake voting certificates, recently expanded its investigation to include the Coffee County episode. A grand jury has issued subpoenas that include Powell and Sullivan Strickler. The company said in a statement to The Post that it was not a target of the investigation and that the company and its employees were witnesses in the case. SullivanStrickler said she believed the attorneys she worked for were authorized to access the voting machines and that the firm had no reason to believe the attorneys would ask her to do anything illegal or improper. “We are confident that it will quickly become apparent that we did nothing wrong and acted in good faith at all times,” it said in a statement.
