Georgia’s aging, paperless voting machines have been called a “sitting duck” for hackers. Six million Georgia voters had reams of personal information exposed by a data breach in Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office earlier this year. Yet Kemp is refusing an offer from the Department of Homeland Security to help shore up the cyber-security of the state’s vulnerable voting machines. Instead, he accused the federal government of attempting to “subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security.” He said the state is capable of handling its own election security, and opined a hack is “not probable at all.” Less than a year ago, Kemp’s office accidentally mailed out a dozen discs containing the private information of more than six million Georgia voters, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, and driver’s license numbers. At the time, Kemp told state lawmakers that while he is “no expert on data security,” he was confident that no information “made it out to the bad guys.” A year before that, tens of thousands of new voter registrations went missing from the state’s database — the vast majority of them belonging to low-income people of color.
Once solidly Republican, a massive effort to register voters of color and a major immigration influx have helped put Georgia on the cusp of becoming a swing state. Donald Trump’s polarizing campaign is not helping the GOP’s cause, and polls for both the presidential and Senate races are tight. This makes Georgia an even more attractive target for hackers, who could flip votes in just a few counties to change the outcome statewide.
Georgia is also one of the few states to still use electronic voting machines that have no paper trail, making a post-election audit to check for hacking or vote-flipping nearly impossible. The decade-old software the machines use — Windows 2000 — also makes the system a “sitting duck” for hackers, cyber-security experts told NPR.
Full Article: State That Exposed 6 Million Voters’ Private Data Says It Doesn’t Need Election Security Aid – ThinkProgress.