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POLITICS
Bloomberg Businessweek
October 8, 2018
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KEMP: JOHN AMIS/AP PHOTO. ABRAMS: PRINCE WILLIAMS/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES
THE BOTTOM LINE In a case that displays the divergence of the
major parties on election fraud, a federal court in Atlanta has put
Georgia’s flawed voting system under intense scrutiny.
Abrams
over a system that blocked more than 30,000 voter
registrations when details such as a missing initial
or stray hyphen didn’t match other public records.
Sixty percent of the blocked voters were black,
according to Sean Young, legal director for the state
ACLU. Under Kemp, Georgia removed 721,202 voters
from the rolls from 2012 through 2016 and 668,691
last year. Civil rights groups are threatening to sue
over the latest wave of removals, saying they tar-
geted minority voters. Mahoney, the Kemp spokes-
man, called allegations of voter suppression baseless
and says 1 million voters have been added to the
rolls. “Thanks to Brian Kemp, it’s easy to vote and
hard to cheat in Georgia.”
In 2016, amid evidence of Russian interference,
Kemp called an ofer by the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security to test Georgia’s election cyber-
security an Obama administration attempt “to
achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the
guise of security.” In testimony to Congress that
September, he called out “conspiracy theorists,
campaigns, and members of the media” as elec-
tion threats. He also accused DHS of trying to hack
Georgia’s system in 2016. The “hacks” turned out to
be routine web searches for gun licenses.
Not long before that, a local cybersecurity
researcher had discovered a far more serious
threat. In August 2016, Logan Lamb was nos-
ing around the website of the Center for Election
Systems at Kennesaw State University (KSU), which
had managed large chunks of the state’s voting
infrastructure for more than a decade. He says he
was hoping to ind information about how the cen-
ter worked, using Google to search for PDF iles.
Instead, he turned up documents listing tens of
thousands of voters, including driver’s license num-
bers. Lamb found he could tap into the databases
used to program voting-machine memory cards
and tally, store, and report votes for some counties.
“I’m not a nation-state adversary like Russia,” he
says. “I’m pretty sure I had the ability to compro-
mise that server, modify that database, and then get
the county workers themselves to put that manip-
ulated ile on the poll books.”
Lamb immediately contacted Merle King, then
the head of the election center, to warn him of the
vulnerabilities. King asked him not to publicize what
he’d found, saying Lamb would be “crushed” by pol-
iticians if he did, according to court ilings. But the
problems weren’t ixed. In February 2017, Lamb and
another researcher looked into the system again and
found the same laws. This time the center alerted
the FBI—which investigated the incident as a hack.
(It did not ind that Lamb had broken the law.)
Kemp and state officials downplayed the
episode, saying Lamb hadn’t gained access to core
systems. They focused instead on preparations for
a House special election. In July came the lawsuit
by the nonproit Coalition for Good Governance
and several state residents accusing Kemp and
other oicials of negligence for allowing the elec-
tion to be run on a compromised voting system.
They asked the court to declare the results void and
stop Georgia from using its equipment.
Days after the suit was iled, KSU destroyed the
servers Lamb had tapped into. There’s been no
accounting of whether anyone at the center or the
FBI checked computer logs for malicious hacking.
Kemp irst expressed outrage but later said the wip-
ing was routine. Last December, though, he ended
the state’s relationship with the center. He contin-
ues to insist elections are secure but concedes the
machines should be replaced by 2020.
As for the lawsuit, Kemp’s response in an August
court iling was derisive: “There is no ‘paper ballot
fairy’ who, with a magic wand at the ready, can save
plaintifs’ half-baked ‘plans’ from devolving into a
iasco.” But at a hearing on Sept. 12, Judge Totenberg
warned that Georgia can’t ignore the problem.
“It afects the credibility of the system,” she said.
A few days later, Totenberg handed Kemp
a reprieve, ruling it was too late to switch to
paper for Nov. 6. But she refused to throw out
the case, warning election officials they had
“buried their heads in the sand.” Kemp and
other defendants have appealed and filed a
motion to stay the case during the process. That
could stall things well into 2019. Kemp remains
ready to certify the results, his own included.
—Margaret Newkirk and Dune Lawrence
Kemp