ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s electronic touchscreen voting system is so riddled with problems that the results of the most expensive House race in U.S. history should be tossed out and a new election held, according to a lawsuit filed by a government watchdog group and six Georgia voters.
The lawsuit was filed Monday in Fulton County Superior Court by the Colorado-based Coalition for Good Governance and voters who are members of the group. It seeks to overturn the results of the June 20 runoff election between Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District. Handel was declared the winner with 52 percent of the vote to Ossoff’s 48.
The named defendants include Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, members of the State Election Board, local election officials in Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb counties and the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University.
The lawsuit claims Georgia’s touchscreen voting system has severe security problems, lacks verifiable paper ballots and cannot be legally used for elections.
A judge in June threw out a related lawsuit earlier that attempted to force Georgia to use paper ballots.
The new lawsuit comes weeks after the publication of a classified National Security Agency report describing a sophisticated scheme, allegedly by Russian military intelligence, to infiltrate local U.S. elections systems using phishing emails.
The suit cites the work of private cybersecurity researcher Logan Lamb, who discovered last August that a misconfigured server had left Georgia’s 6.7 million voter records and other sensitive files exposed to hackers. The complaint also notes that seven months after Lamb made that discovery, another researcher was able to do the same.
A spokeswoman for Kemp did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. But in a column Sunday in USA Today, Kemp blamed the news media for developing “false narratives about Russian hacking and potential vulnerabilities in the system. The prevailing plot line is that states like Georgia can’t provide suitable security for elections.”
Kemp asserted that states are doing enough to keep elections secure, and he said, “Anything to the contrary is fake news.”
Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, said the lawsuit was filed hours ahead of a deadline at midnight Monday to contest the election. She says the group does election integrity work in multiple states.
This could be fun, just for the irritation value.
While I appreciate the gesture, this is going nowhere.
Mike Farb has pointed out several discrepancies which on their face warrant a closer look. In particular, the broad swings between e-day and EV just seem too perfectly aligned, where the e-day swing almost perfectly offsets the EV margin with more votes cast on e-day to produce a narrow GOP win. The idea that Dems vote early and GOP vote late are not likely to be this symmetrically aligned.
We’ve had 3 elections where there has been some suspicion of rigging of end totals (FL '00; OH '04; '16 (everywhere)). I really do hope that the judges will stop looking at this as partisan whining and politically destabilizing and actually allow the case to move forward and discovery to take place. Let judges (and juries) hear from experts about the statistical anomalies that would suggest fraud in any other context. The nation has a fear to acknowledge that our elections could be rigged, and the GOP takes full advantage of that timidity to push the envelope. Today’s tools make rigging more than a non-trivial statistical likelihood. Let’s dive into this one. Let’s root out where the vulnerabilities are and whether hacking occurred. We already know the Russians did successfully hack our voting systems in '16 but that DHS is too scared to find out how much damage they actually did.
liked x infinity
Agree with every bit of your comment. And we know that Dallas Co. Texas was a Russian target and we vote on Diebold evoting machines.
Well that statement just fills me with confidence in the probity, competence and integrity of said officials.
Addendum: and you know, when you think back over the comments and behavior of the Georgia voting officials since before the special election, and their insistence that their unauditable 1990’s vintage OS machines are fine, just fine, dammit, now git your yankee questions and crazy talk about Russian hacking (whoever heard of such a thing!) out of our bidness!," the the stronger the odor of corruption and fear sweat.
Wouldn’t the expected response if everything was on the up and up usually be something like “as public officials, we take our job of ensuring the sanctity of the vote with the utmost seriousness we are always monitoring and considering ways to make our already high security even better and we therefore welcome these nettlesome intrusive inquires by uppity outsiders?”
The tinge of suppressed hysteria in their statements is unmistakable.