Given the multitude of issues related to the State of Georgia’s elections system including: data breaches, issues and lawsuits related to its unauditable black-box elections system, server wipes at a time of legal scrutiny, voter suppression accusations after voter purge and attempts to close precincts, highly suspicious election drop-off rates in African American communities – It’s time to create a log of many of the related news stories chronicling the Georgia Secretary of State’s failure to preside over fair and transparent elections with news stories dating from 2015 onward.

Coverage

  • Sep 16, 2016 AJC: One of the nation’s most unique election partnerships is in Georgia
    The state’s collaboration with the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University…has only one client – the state – and only a handful of staff and student assistants, yet it has a hand in almost every operation that touches Election Day. It creates every ballot (even the local ones) used in every election every year across the state; sources every electronic poll book (list of eligible voters) used in every election for each of the state’s 3,000 precincts; and tests every single piece of voting equipment used across the state
  • Sep 9, 2016 AJC: An election primer on Georgia’s voting system and ballot security
  • Aug 28, 2016 Politico: Elections security: Federal help or power grab?
  • Aug 25, 2016 Nextgov: At Least One State Declines Offer for DHS Voting Security
    “Georgia, which is running electronic-only machines—there’s no paper trail. … And the machines they’re using are more than a decade old…and the operating system they’re using is Windows 2000, which hasn’t been updated for security for years, which means it’s a sitting duck,” Zeynep Tufekci, a University of North Carolina information and library science professor, told NPR on Saturday.

Imagery

March 3, 2017


NOVEMBER 7, 2016
November 7, 2016

Resources

  • Coalition for Good Governance
  • MIT Election Lab
  • Dr. Michael Herron, Dartmouth Professor of Government Chair, Program in Quantitative Social Science and others
  • Rich Demillo, Phd, Professor of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and former Chief Technology Officer at Hewlett-Packard
  • Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan
    “Voting is not as safe as it needs to be,” Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, said Monday. “The safest technology is to have voters vote on a piece of paper.”
  • State Rep Scot Turner
    “When you see a machine flip votes, you have to admit things are vulnerable,” Turner, a Republican from Holly Springs, said after watching Halderman’s demonstration. “It might take a wide-scale effort to do what he did on a statewide basis, but it can be done. We owe it to the voters to make sure it’s not.”
  • Mark Niesse, AJC reporter
  • Greg Bluestein, AJC reporter
  • Kristina Torres, AJC reporter
  • Marian Schneider, President of the Verified Voting Foundation
  • Sara Henderson, Executive Director of Common Cause Georgia
  • Pew Research Center
  • Casey Cagle, Fmr Lt Governor (R)
    Cagle told WABE that a paper ballot trail “ensures that accuracy is there, and that there are no games that potentially could be played.”

About Empower Elections

Empower Elections monitors and supports elections using visual analytics and advocacy.  Headquartered in Atlanta, GA, the company advocates audit-able election systems, hand-marked paper ballots with recount authority and transparency in the elections process.

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