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.”
The lack of a paper-trail to verify results isn’t the only problem with Georgia’s election system.
“Our machines haven’t been updated since 2005, they’re running on Windows 2000,” the policy director at Common Cause Georgia, Sara Henderson, told Wired. “It’s ridiculous.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R) declined a 2016 offer from the Department of Homeland Security to help the state safeguard their election systems.
Full Article: No paper trail: Georgia’s antiquated voting system prevents an audit for hacks.