Despite Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s contentions that reports questioning the security of the state’s election systems are fake news, a breach discovered in 2016 exposed the records of more than six million George voters, according to a lawsuit. “The data was open to anyone in the world who had an internet connection,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, one of the plaintiffs in the suit cited by CNN. “Even when confronted with a security disaster, she noted, Kemp, who’s currently running at a GOP gubernatorial candidate, blamed “managers under his supervision for their incompetence and [left] the security disaster without so much as a forensic review of the impacts of the security failures.”
Kemp reiterated to the news outlet the state’s election systems were secure and pilloried those causing for changes this close to the November midterms. “The hysteria of some people seeking to force Georgia to switch to an all paper ballot system is based on misinformation, and making this change would spend money to create problems that we should avoid,” said Kemp. “The chaos of switching to a completely different voting system this close to an election would cause inconvenience, voter confusion, and potentially suppressed turn-out.”
Security researcher Logan Lamb found the voter registration data – 15GB’s worth – in August 2016 that it could be easily downloaded from the Kennesaw State University website.
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 center’s work when he set up an automated script to scrape the site and see what he could find.
Full Article: Georgia voter records exposure raises election security concerns.