This one’s been off my radar
The insurrectionist-in-chief plans to proudly turn himself in today for booking in Atlanta. Donald Trump, the ever-blustery showman and former president, has scheduled the media circus in primetime for maximum television ratings.
Receiving less coverage is the multi-state plot to access voting software included in Fulton County District Attorney Fanu Willis’ indictment. Ben Clements and Susan Greenhalgh take up the story for Slate.
“There have been multiple accounts of Trump supporters unlawfully accessing voting systems to copy proprietary vote-recording and vote-counting software in Michigan, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. These reports spurred criminal investigations in their respective states, but until Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed charges last week, none of these probes had tied the crimes back to Trump’s coordinated, multipronged plot to stay in power,” the pair explain.
Willis includes the software heist in her racketeering indictment. The irony is that it was uncovered not by state or federal authorities but by the nonprofit “Coalition for Good Governance, in connection with a civil lawsuit that has been ongoing since 2017.” The group turned up evidence that Sydney Powell “allegedly funded and directed the January 2021 theft in Coffee County as part of a multistate contract to take copies of voting software—in not just Georgia, but also Michigan and Nevada.”
Clements and Greenhalgh lay out the plot that forced the resignation of Coffee County election supervisor, Misty Hampton (since indicted):
Following Hampton’s resignation, her successor, James Barnes, reported “alarming” irregularities in the Coffee elections office to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The secretary’s office told Barnes it would investigate. But according to Barnes, no one followed up.
Shortly after he took office, Barnes found that he couldn’t access the county’s election management server because the password had been changed without authorization from, or knowledge of, Raffensperger’s office. The secretary’s technicians were unable to access the election server and were forced to replace it, but (according to Barnes) they did not investigate further. In August 2021, Barnes wrote a memo to the secretary of state detailing further security concerns he’d observed in the Coffee office when he was first hired, including the disquieting fact that the faceplates of some of the vote tabulators had been removed.
Although the secretary’s investigators had open investigations into other incidents in Coffee County, an investigation summary filed in September 2021 seems to show that, despite these multiple red flags, none of these issues were examined by the secretary’s investigators. In fact, in late April 2022, even after evidence of the breach had been provided, the secretary of state’s chief operating officer, Gabe Sterling, derisively denied that the breach had occurred. And when questioned by a reporter, Raffensperger provided conflicting answers as to when his office first learned of the software breaches.
Clements and Greenhalgh insist:
There is still no indication that the federal government is investigating the multistate plot to take voting software. The Georgia Bureau of Investigations is still slow-walking the investigation and has not held anyone accountable. And the Georgia secretary of state is still downplaying and dismissing the significance of the software theft.
I’m in no position to opine on the alleged vulnerabilities of the software itself. But I will note that just because a skilled hacker, given access to the machines, enough of them, with enough time, and undetected, could, in theory, manipulate election results, does not mean it is likely to happen or has happened or is widespread.
But if Powell and others did indeed conspire to access election equipment in multiple states, they should face prosecution in each and every one.