The Associated Press reported that a computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system. The erasure took place on July 7, just three days after the filing of a lawsuit questioning the security and accuracy of Georgia’s election infrastructure. Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the chief state election official in the state has denied ordering the erasure and blamed “the undeniable ineptitude” at the Kennesaw State elections center. For their part, a spokesman for Kennesaw attributed the server wiping to “standard operating procedure.” SavannahNow called the erasure an “outrageous security lapse” and Slate questioned whether the move was evidence of “incompetence or a cover-up.”
The impact on the ongoing lawsuit is unclear nor is it clear why Georgia officials decided to wipe the server, but, as Gizmodo noted, choosing to do so in the midst of a lawsuit doesn’t look great. Marilyn Marks, the executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, which is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told the AP, “I don’t think you could find a voting systems expert who would think the deletion of the server data was anything less than insidious and highly suspicious.”
State election officials from Rhode Island and Virginia urged members of Congress to send more resources to states to bolster the security of their election IT infrastructure. Both states have recently scrapped old, outdated voting technology in favor of more secure systems to ensure voter confidence in election results. Virginia recently decertified all direct recording electronic voting machines and Rhode Island, aready using a statewide paper ballot voting system, will conduct post election risk-limiting audits.
According to a deposition unsealed tis week, Kris Kobach, the vice chairman of the President’s fraud commission says he wants to change U.S. election law so states have an incentive to require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. ACLU lawyer Orion Danjuma was quoted by AP saying “[t]o me, they really confirmed what we always suspected: that there is this ready-made plan to gut the core voting rights protections of federal law and Kobach has been lobbying Trump and his top team from day one to execute that scheme.”
The Maine Senate voted 19-10 to delay a citizen-backed law that called on the first state to adopt a ranked-choice voting system until December 2021. If a constitutional amendment hasn’t been passed by then to address legal concerns raised by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court about the law by then, it would be repealed.
In a direct response to the Green Party recount effort last year, the Michigan House Elections and Ethics Committee approved a bill that would require “aggrieved candidates” to show that they could have won the election if not for fraud or error.
In an optimistic headline, WHYY announced that New Jersey would be replacing their aging voting machines and indeed this may eventually be one of the results of hearings held this week on voting system security. New Jersey is one of just five states that exclusively uses paperless machines that record votes directly into computer memory without an independently verifiable paper trail.
After tackling partisan gerrymandering in October, the U.S. Supreme Court will take on the controversial issue of voter purges in a November case that could have major implications for the 2018 mid-term elections. Scheduled for oral argument on Nov. 8, Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute will determine whether failure to cast a ballot in recent elections, or “voter inactivity,” can lawfully trigger efforts to remove a person from the voter registration rolls.
The Czech Statistics Office says the web sites it used to publish results from a parliamentary election were hacked. The office made the announcement after two sites the office maintains with an outside provider were unavailable for some period of time. Needless to say spokesmen for the agency assured the public that “the attack did not in any way affect either the infrastructure used for the transmission of election results or the independent data processing.”
Kenyan opposition supporters clashed with police and threw up burning barricades on Thursday to challenge the legitimacy of an election rerun likely to return Uhuru Kenyatta as president of East Africa’s chief economic and political powerhouse. A boycott by supporters of opposition candidates led to low turnout that many are concerned will undermine the credibility of the election.