Georgia: Lawsuit filed to throw out 6th District result | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Karen Handel’s win in the hotly contested 6th Congressional District special election should be thrown out and the contest redone, according to a new lawsuit seeking to ultimately invalidate Georgia’s aging electronic voting system. The suit, filed in Fulton County Superior Court, is the second pursued in less than two months by a Colorado-based group over the security of Georgia’s election infrastructure. The suit says those concerns include private cybersecurity researcher Logan Lamb’s finding last year that a misconfigured server at Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems — which has helped run Georgia’s elections for the past 15 years — exposed more than 6.5 million voter records and other sensitive information that opponents said could be used to alter results. The same records were accessed a second time earlier this year by another security researcher. The FBI investigated both Lamb’s and the second researcher’s probing but did not file charges, saying neither of the two had broken federal law.

Georgia: Secretary of State’s office: “We look forward to our day in court” | WGCL

A spokeswoman for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp indicated Thursday that Kemp is eager to show a jury why there should not be a rematch between Karen Handel and Jon Ossoff in the 6th District Congressional race. The plaintiffs, meanwhile, demonstrated for reporters why they believe their lawsuit has merit. A diverse group of Georgia voters, along with a nonprofit government watchdog group, filed a lawsuit Monday in Fulton County Superior Court demanding that the results of the June 20th special election runoff be tossed out. The suit requests a new election using a paper ballot system. The suit names as defendants Kemp, local elections supervisors who oversaw the runoff election, and Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems and its director, Merle King.

Georgia: Voters, Colorado nonprofit sue to overturn special election results in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District | Colorado Politics

A group of Georgia voters and a Colorado-based watchdog organization filed a lawsuit late Monday asking a judge to overturn the results of last month’s 6th Congressional District special election and scrap the state’s voting system, Colorado Politics has learned. The complaint, filed in Fulton County Superior Court, alleges that state and local election officials ignored warnings for months that Georgia’s centralized election system — already known for potential security flaws and lacking a paper trail to verify results — had been compromised and left unprotected from intruders since at least last summer, casting doubt on Republican Karen Handel’s 3.8-point win over Democrat Jon Ossoff in the most expensive House race in the nation’s history. … The plaintiffs — including Colorado nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance and Georgia voters from both major political parties and a conservative third party — charge that recent revelations about a security hole on a computer server used to run Georgia elections only amplified longstanding concerns about the state’s antiquated voting equipment and its susceptibility to hackers. “We aren’t questioning one candidate over another,” lead plaintiff Donna Curling told Colorado Politics. “We’re saying it’s impossible to know.”

Georgia: Lawsuit Seeks to Void Georgia Congressional Election Results | Associated Press

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.

Georgia: Many Troubling, Unanswered Questions about Voting Machinery in Georgia House Runoff | Alternet

The results from Georgia’s sixth district congressional race are odd. Jon Ossoff, the Democratic newcomer who ran against Republican former Secretary of State Karen Handel, won the absentee vote 64% to 36%. That vote was conducted on paper ballots that were mailed in and scanned on optical scanners. Ossoff also won the early voting 51% to 49%. Those results closely mirror recent polls that had him ahead by 1-3 points. In the highest of those polls, he was ahead by 7% with 5% undecided and a 4% margin of error. On Election Day, Handel pulled out a whopping 16 percent lead, for a crushing 58% to 42% division of the day’s votes. That means that all 5% of the undecided voters broke for Handel, the poll was off by its farthest estimate and another 3.5% of Ossoff’s voters switched sides into her camp. All this despite Ossoff’s intensive door-to-door ground offensive that Garland Favorito, who lives in the heart of the sixth district called the “most massive operation” he’s ever seen. Favorito is the founder of VoterGA, a nonpartisan election reform group. He said Handel had signs up, but her canvassing operation didn’t approach Ossoff’s.

Georgia: Federal review debunks Georgia election hack accusation | Associated Press

Allegations that the federal government tried to hack Georgia’s election systems were unfounded, according to a letter the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general sent Monday to Congress. The conclusion comes more than six months after Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp accused the department of attempting to “breach our firewall” a week after the November presidential election. The letter said investigators with the inspector general’s Digital Forensics and Analysis Unit reviewed computer data from the federal agency, Kemp’s office and also interviewed a contractor. They also recreated the contractor’s actions. The data, Roth wrote, confirmed the contractor’s statements that on Nov. 15 he used a public page on Kemp’s website to verify security guards’ weapons certification licensing, which he then copied into a spreadsheet.

Georgia: No paper trail: Georgia’s antiquated voting system prevents an audit for hacks | Raw Story

The polls are closing in Georgia following the most expensive congressional election in American history. As results are announced, there’s significant controversy over the credibility of those results. “Georgia’s voting issues aren’t rooted in any specific hacking threat,” reports Wired. “The problem instead lies in the state’s inability to prove if fraud or tampering happened in the first place.” The state of Georgia has 27,000 voting machines from the now-defunct Premier Election Systems (formerly known as Diebold) and 6,000 ExpressPoll machines — also made by Diebold. None of the machines have a paper trail. “You have an un-provable system,” says Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting told Wired. “It might be right, it might not be right, and that absence of authoritative confirmation is the biggest problem. It’s corrosive.”

Georgia: Threats cloud sixth district election security | WXIA

Elections officials say they are taking steps to ensure the security of voting Tuesday in the sixth congressional district race. It’s gotten national attention, and it was the apparent motive behind a dozen threatening letters discovered Thursday. The threats appeared in the mailboxes of residents living near Republican congressional candidate Karen Handel, and the candidate herself. They also appeared in the mailrooms of two media outlets – WXIA and WAGA-TV. They all contained computer-printed rants against Handel and President Donald Trump. And some contained a powder identified in some of the notes as anthrax – but which authorities believe was actually baking soda.

Georgia: Will the Georgia Special Election Get Hacked? | Politico

Last August, when the FBI reported that hackers were probing voter registration databases in more than a dozen states, prompting concerns about the integrity of the looming presidential election, Logan Lamb decided he wanted to get his hands on a voting machine. A 29-year-old former cybersecurity researcher with the federal government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Lamb, who now works for a private internet security firm in Georgia, wanted to assess the security of the state’s voting systems. When he learned that Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems tests and programs voting machines for the entire state of Georgia, he searched the center’s website. “I was just looking for PDFs or documents,” he recalls, hoping to find anything that might give him a little more sense of the center’s work. But his curiosity turned to alarm when he encountered a number of files, arranged by county, that looked like they could be used to hacked an election. Lamb wrote an automated script to scrape the site and see what was there, then went off to lunch while the program did its work. When he returned, he discovered that the script had downloaded 15 gigabytes of data.

Georgia: The Georgia Runoff Election Doesn’t Have a Paper Trail to Safeguard Against Hacks | WIRED

Early voting in the runoff for Georgia’s Sixth District congressional seat kicked off May 30; election day itself comes on June 20. The race has garnered national attention as one in which Democrats could pick up a long-held Republican seat. It has also generated scrutiny, though, for taking place in a state with some of the most lax protections against electoral fraud, at a time when Russia has meddled freely in campaigns in the US and abroad. But Georgia’s voting issues aren’t rooted in any specific hacking threat. The problem instead lies in the state’s inability to prove if fraud or tampering happened in the first place. By not deploying a simple paper backup system, Georgia opens itself up to one of the most damaging electoral outcomes of all: uncertainty.
“You have an un-provable system,” says Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a group that promotes best practices at the polls. “It might be right, it might not be right, and that absence of authoritative confirmation is the biggest problem. It’s corrosive.”

Georgia: Special election disruption concerns rise after 6.7M records leaked | SC Magazine

Several security vulnerabilities in systems used to manage Georgia’s election technology, exposing the records of 6.7 million voters months before the nation most expensive House race slated for June 20, has raised the fears that the election could be disrupted. Although 29-year-old security researcher Logan Lamb spotted and reported the vulnerabilities in August 2016, he said the state has continuously ignored efforts to patch the vulnerabilities of Georgia’s special election between Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff against Republican former Secretary of State Karen Handel, according to Politico. Lamb began looking into the voting systems when he learned that Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems tests and programs voting machines. He began looking for PDFs or documents that would give him more insight into the centers work when he set up an automated script to scrape the site and see what he could find.

Georgia: GOP congressional candidate Handel ignored election integrity report, Georgia professor says | The Washington Post

Eleven years ago, after Karen Handel had been elected as Georgia’s first Republican secretary of state since Reconstruction, Richard DeMillo, head of the Office of Policy Analysis and Research at Georgia Tech, got a call about an important project. The state’s election system, updated with new machines, needed a hard look. “They said: Take a look at our processes, take a look at our technology, and give us your opinion,” DeMillo said. “I assigned some people from our Information Security Center to work on it.” In May 2008, the Georgia Tech Information Security Center and Office of Policy Analysis and Research released its report, “A Security Study of the Processes and Procedures Surrounding Electronic Voting in Georgia.” A number of potential problems came up, from the transportation of election machines by prison laborers to password protection of machines and poll-watcher training.

Georgia: Security lapses may lead Georgia to ditch election data center | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Kennesaw State University center that has helped run Georgia’s elections for the past 15 years may lose its contract in a matter of weeks because of concerns over security lapses that left 6.5 million voter records exposed. The secretary of state’s office said Wednesday that it is “actively investigating alternative arrangements” to using Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems, news that coincided with the unmasking by Politico Magazine of the security researchers behind a data scare involving the center that became public in March. “All options are on the table,” said Candice Broce, a spokeswoman for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp. The center’s annual $800,000 contract with the state ends June 30.

Georgia: Researcher finds Georgia voter records exposed on internet | Associated Press

A security researcher disclosed a gaping security hole at the outfit that manages Georgia’s election technology, days before the state holds a closely watched congressional runoff vote on June 20. The security failure left the state’s 6.7 million voter records and other sensitive files exposed to hackers, and may have been left unpatched for seven months. The revealed files might have allowed attackers to plant malware and possibly rig votes or wreak chaos with voter rolls during elections. Georgia is especially vulnerable to such disruption, as the entire state relies on antiquated touchscreen voting machines that provide no hardcopy record of votes, making it all but impossible to tell if anyone has manipulated the tallies. The true dimensions of the failure were first reported Wednesday by Politico Magazine . The affected Center for Election Systems referred all questions to its host, Kennesaw State University, which declined comment. In March, the university had mischaracterized the flaw’s discovery as a security breach.

Georgia: Will Russia Hack Georgia’s Election? Report Says Its A Possibility | International Business Times

Georgia’s voting systems are susceptible to hacking, and the state has dragged its feet addressing the issue, Politico reported Wednesday. The report arrived ahead of the state’s forthcoming election, which was scheduled for next week. The race will fill the seat vacated by Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. The race pitted Democrat Jon Ossoff , a first-time candidate, against Republican Karen Handel, who was previously Georgia’s Secretary of State. According to the Washington Post last week, the June 20 special House race in Georgia’s sixth district has become the most expensive in history. Elections in Georgia are overseen by a central hub at Kennesaw University called the Center for Election Systems, which was founded in 2002. Politico spoke to security experts that found the systems easy to hack into. “I was absolutely stunned, just the sheer quantity of files I had acquired,” said Logan Lamb, a former cybersecurity research told Politico about testing the vulnerabilities of Georgia’s system.

Georgia: Judge throws out request to use paper ballots in the upcoming special election | Slate

On Friday, a judge dismissed the lawsuit to use paper ballots in the upcoming June 20 special election to decide the Georgia’s 6th Congressional District seat. The high-profile race between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel will fill the seat left behind by Tom Price, who now serves as Trump’s secretary of health and human services. … Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp appeared happy with the results and said that he applauds “the judge for finding what we already know: Our voting machines in Georgia are safe and accurate.” However, Kemp has previously expressed concern about voting-system security. In 2016, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp accused the Department of Homeland Security of trying to hack into Georgia’s computer network.

Georgia: How safe are the state’s voting machines? | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Millions of voters have cast their ballots in Georgia using machines that offer a now-common experience: Press the touch screen, record your choice on anything from a local mayoral race to a presidential election. It is a simple action that belies the complex system that supports it. And it is a system that is under increasing attack. Georgia’s aging election system has flaws that could be exploited if a malicious hacker ever breached it, experts say. It’s a fear that has escalated with regular news reports about alleged attempts by Russian hackers to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, an issue raised again last week by the release of a leaked National Security Agency document. … The news three months ago of a potential data breach at Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems raised alarms that for critics of Georgia’s system is still ringing.

Georgia: Judge dismisses paper-ballot lawsuit in Georgia’s 6th District | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Voters in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District will continue to cast ballots on electronic machines after a Fulton County judge dismissed a lawsuit trying to force the use of paper ballots. Superior Court Judge Kimberly Esmond Adams’ ruling late Friday night came after an eight-hour hearing earlier this week over the suit’s insistence that Georgia’s reliance on voting machines was endangering the vote. The machines, it said, are too old, unreliable and vulnerable to malicious cyber attacks without a forensic review to verify they had not been compromised. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp celebrated Adams’ decision, which came two weeks into the state’s mandatory three-week early voting period for the nationally watched June 20 runoff between Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff​.

Georgia: Ruling on paper-ballot suit in Georgia’s 6th District coming soon | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Voters in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District will likely know by week’s end whether they can continue using electronic machines or will have to cast ballots on paper. A decision to go with paper ballots would all but void the state’s current voting system with less than two weeks to go before a key election. A Fulton County judge heard eight hours of testimony and arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit calling for paper ballots in the hotly contested June 20 runoff between Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff.

Georgia: Expert witnesses weigh in on alleged ‘unsafe’ voting machines at hearing | WXIA

A non-profit group is demanding that Fulton County use paper ballots during the sixth district runoff race. In a motion brought by Rocky Mountain Foundation and members of Georgians for Verified Voting, the organizations presented a case that the state’s touch screen-based voting system is “uncertified, unsafe and inaccurate” and that the county officials must instead use paper ballots in the election to have a verifiable transparent election. The group noted a FBI investigation of a cyber-attack on the Center for Election Systems (CES) at Kennesaw State University, the entity responsible for testing and programming voting machines across Georgia.

Georgia: Gwinnett County renews effort to get minority voting rights suit dismissed | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Gwinnett County, its school district and its elections board have filed new motions arguing for the dismissal of a minority voting rights lawsuit filed against them last fall. The federal suit — filed in August on behalf of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, the Georgia NAACP and several individual plaintiffs — claims that the way Gwinnett’s Board of Commissioners and school board districts are drawn dilutes the ability of minority voters to elect candidates of their choice. Gwinnett is a minority-majority county but has never had a non-white candidate elected to either board.

Georgia: Who gets to vote in 6th District? Politicians already decided | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Who gets to vote and who doesn’t in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District is more than an accident of geography. It’s also the result of decades of political shenanigans by Democrats and Republicans alike. State legislators have dramatically redrawn the 6th District’s boundaries to gain political advantage, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found. For decades, the district covered several counties west and southwest of Atlanta, all the way to the Alabama line. It never elected a Republican until 1978, when Newt Gingrich was elected to an open seat. But in 1991, Democrats tried to draw Gingrich out of his own district. They gave the 6th an entirely new footprint, centered on Cobb County.

Georgia: Group sues to use paper ballots in Georgia 6th Run-Off | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Georgia’s voting infrastructure is too old, unreliable and vulnerable to be used without a forensic review of its operating systems, according to a lawsuit seeking to require voters’ use of paper ballots for next month’s 6th Congressional District runoff election. The suit, filed in Fulton County Superior Court, names Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp — the state’s top election official — as a defendant, along with the election directors for all three counties that have communities in the 6th District: Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton. It comes at a crucial time. Early in-person voting for the June 20 runoff begins Tuesday, with all eyes on Georgia ahead of the hotly contested race between Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff. … The Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Foundation filed the suit in conjunction with two Georgia voters, Donna Curling and Donna Price. Both Price and Curling are members of the foundation, which focuses on fair elections and government transparency, as well as a group called Georgians for Verified Voting.

Georgia: Johns Creek Election May Be Illegitimate, Voting Group Alleges | Johns Creek Patch

The results of a special Johns Creek City Council election held April 18 may not be legitimate, according to a report by the nonprofit group VoterGA. The report focuses its critique on alleged security flaws in voting machines and says the election was improperly scheduled. Three separate elections were held that night: the Johns Creek City Council election, the Roswell City Council run-off and the Sixth District Congressional race. … But there were problems in the Johns Creek election, according to VoterGA.

Georgia: As millions pour into Georgia’s congressional runoff, the voting machinery is among the worst in America | Salon

There are so many disturbing aspects to the special election happening in Georgia’s sixth congressional district, it’s hard to know where to begin. For starters, the election runs on Microsoft Server 2000. That is not a typo. “That’s a crap system,” said Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa in a phone interview; adding that the database in use, Microsoft Access is a “toy database” that should never be used for industrial applications. nFulton County Elections Director Richard Barron acknowledged in testimony on the troubled first round of the election, that the system is “inflexible.” But delving into his testimony further, and speaking to both local and national computer experts it’s evident that the results of the first round of the election on April 18th are legitimately suspect and that no election running on this type of computer system can be verified as accurate.

Georgia: Watchdog: 6th District runoff latest skirmish in voting rights war | Atlanta Journal Constitution

These past two weeks have been great for shareholders in the clipboard industry as an army of volunteers canvassed Georgia’s 6th Congressional District registering voters ahead of the June 20 runoff between Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff. The last-minute push for new voters came as a result of a federal lawsuit brought against the state by a coalition of civil rights groups claiming the state violated federal law by closing down registration for the special election too early. The constitutionality of Georgia’s voter registration law is still undecided, but a federal judge issued an order reopening registration for the race for two weeks while the case grinds forward. The lawsuit is another salvo in the endless back-and-forth over voting rights in the state, a battle that has its roots in Georgia’s darkest history.

Georgia: Voters seek review of Georgia voting system before 6th District runoff | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Eleven voters have asked Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp to review the state’s voting system ahead of next month’s hotly contested 6th Congressional District runoff. The request is allowed under state law. It comes after one of the three counties in the district — Fulton — experienced a technical snafu on April 18 that delayed reported election results in the race. It also follows a letter to Kemp in March from a group of voting advocates who recommended that the state overhaul its elections system and begin using a system with a paper audit trail.

Georgia: Voter registration backlog ahead of Georgia’s 6th District runoff | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Local counties under order to reopen voter registration in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District face a backlog of tens of thousands of applications and have already begun working overtime to process them all in time for the June 20 runoff election. Still, despite concerns that a federal judge’s order would back them into a corner, no problems have been reported so far as the counties themselves appear to have hit the ground running. “Everything has been going very smoothly,” said Candice Broce, a spokeswoman for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the state’s top elections official. All three counties that have areas in the 6th District — Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton — had contingency plans in place in anticipation of Thursday’s ruling. The first of tens of thousands of backlogged registration applications have already begun to be processed, although officials said it is impossible to know how many of them involve residents in each county who actually reside in the district itself. That’s because it’s not readily apparent on the applications themselves.

Georgia: Republican accuses Democrat of voter registration ‘trick’ | The Hill

Karen Handel, the Republican nominee in Georgia’s closely watched 6th District special election, is accusing Democrats of a “trick” by convincing a federal judge to extend voter registration in the district. Handel, who faces Democrat Jon Ossoff in a runoff next month, lampooned Thursday’s federal court decision to reopen voter registration in a Monday fundraising email signed by the candidate. … Democrats fell just short of flipping the historically Republican seat in April when Ossoff fell short of the 50 percent threshold needed to win the jungle primary outright. While the outcome is giving Republicans a chance to reorganize and coalesce behind one candidate, Ossoff’s strong performance gave his party hope that he could flip the seat and send a chill through Republicans ahead of the 2018 midterms.

Georgia: 6th district runoff: Judge orders Georgia to reopen voter registration | Atlanta Journal Constitution

A federal judge on Thursday ordered Georgia to temporarily reopen voter registration ahead of a hotly contested congressional runoff in the 6th District. U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten made the ruling as part of a broader lawsuit by a Washington-based advocacy group, which last month accused Georgia of violating federal law by reducing the amount of time residents have to register to vote. Voter registration shut down March 20 ahead of the deciding runoff June 20 for the 6th District election, which is being held in the northern suburbs of metro Atlanta. Batten, however, ordered registration immediately reopened until May 21.