The governor’s race in Georgia between Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp has turned into an ugly, drawn-out affair, and we won’t know the final results for a while. Mr. Kemp, the Republican, declared victory and resigned as Georgia’s secretary of state so he wouldn’t be responsible for overseeing the counting of votes in the race — though before he resigned he did make an unsubstantiated claim that Democrats were hacking the election. There is a silver lining in this mess: The new secretary of state could finally fix Georgia’s astoundingly insecure voting system, one of the most poorly protected in the country. This has been a rough election for Georgians. Accusations of racism and voter suppression have abounded. An outside investigation found that more than 340,000 voter registrations had been improperly canceled by Mr. Kemp’s office. A significant number were reinstated by court order, but there is no way of knowing if voter turnout would have been even higher if the Kemp purge hadn’t happened.
… Earlier in the campaign cycle, a cybersecurity researcher discovered that Georgia’s entire voter database (housed at Kennesaw State University), which contains the records of 6.7 million voters, was at risk. And when the Department of Homeland Security told Mr. Kemp that Georgia had been one of 21 states targeted by Russian hackers in 2016, he waved off the threat and declined help from Washington for the midterms, saying that the state had everything under control.
It gets worse. Georgia is one of five states that rely solely on direct-recording electronic voting machines. These machines don’t have a paper trail, which makes it hard to detect manipulation of the vote.
Full Article: Opinion | Georgia’s Shaky Voting System – The New York Times.