Vote-hacking feuds grow
Suit over contentious Ga. election could be sign of what’s to come
First elections, then probes into hacking. Now, lawsuits over election hacking.
A group of Democrat and Republican voters in Georgia is suing the state to overturn its fiercely fought June special election, saying evidence the state’s voter database was exposed to potential hackers for at least eight months invalidates the results. The lawsuit, which went to pretrial conferences this week, could be a sign of disputes to come as revelations mount about the vulnerability of the U.S. election system and Russian attempts to infiltrate it.
“As public attention finally starts to focus on the cybersecurity of election systems, we will see more suits like this one, and eventually, a woke judge will invalidate an election,” said Bruce McConnell, vice president of the EastWest Institute and former Department of Homeland Security deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity during the Obama administration.
Georgia’s June special election to fill a congressional seat vacated by Tom Price, who left to become President Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, was the most expensive House race ever. Democrats nationwide pumped $23 million to back candidate Jon Ossoff while President Trump stumped for Republican Karen Handel, pointing to her win as proof of his campaign’s popularity.
Plaintiffs argue the disclosure in August 2016 by Logan Lamb, a Georgia-based computer security expert, that much of Georgia’s voting system was inadvertently left out in the open on the Internet without password protection from August 2016 to March should make the results moot.
What’s more, Georgia’s use of what the plaintiffs say are insecure touch-screen voting computers, which they claim don’t comply with state requirements for security testing, means the election results couldn’t legally be certified, they say.
“We hope that this case serves to vindicate the Constitutional rights of the voters in Georgia and sheds a light on the very serious national issue of the vulnerability of electronic voting systems to manipulation and mischief,” Edward Schwartz, a partner with Steptoe & Johnson, a Washington, D.C., law firm that joined plaintiffs on a pro bono basis this week, told USA TODAY.
The suit comes at a highly charged time for election officials nationwide due to heightened awareness over the vulnerabilities of the U.S. election system af- ter Russia attempted to influence the 2016 election. According to the FBI, as many as 39 states had their election systems scanned or targeted by Russia. Whether Georgia was one isn’t known, but Georgia did decline an offer the Department of Homeland Security made to all states to help secure election systems before the 2016 presidential election.
At the time, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told news site NextGov, “The question remains whether the federal government will subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security.”
Nationwide, election officials are just getting a grasp of how, via malicious acts or inadvertent mistakes, parts of the voting apparatus are vulnerable to interference. Last week, the Chicago Board of Election Commissions said the names, addresses, dates of birth and other information about Chicago’s 1.8 million registered voters was left publicly available online by a third-party election company for an unknown period of time.
The Georgia special election suit is the second time the Charlotte-based Coalition for Good Governance, a non-partisan nonprofit that is organizing the Georgia suit, has attempted to have the state’s voting system declared vulnerable. The first suit, filed in June, was dismissed when a judge found there was no evidence the machines had malfunctioned.