Guest Post: Rep. Scott Holcomb Discusses Russia and Election Integrity in Georgia
N.B.: The following is a guest post from State Representative Scott Holcomb (D-Atlanta). Holcomb is one of the leading voices on election integrity in Georgia. – TLA
Our federal government needs to speak with one voice about the security of our elections. That isn’t happening.
And our state needs to take action, too. That’s not happening either.
We all know about President Trump’s multiple flip-flops last week. One moment he was agreeing with Putin and patting him on the back, and the next day he said he misspoke. And then he changed his story again. It’s head spinning when it should be simple. We must acknowledge how foreign governments, such as Russia, have sought to influence our elections. And we must ensure that it never happens again.
The evidence on what happened is overwhelming. The report issued by the intelligence community last year was conclusive: Russia intervened to benefit Trump. And this threat of foreign influence continues. The current Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats recently said that Russia is an “aggressive foreign actor” who undeniably interfered in our 2016 election and will continue its efforts to undermine our democracy. He said the lights are blinking red and Russia’s efforts are ongoing. And now that we are heading into a trade war with China, that potential threat exists, too. American businesses have been dealing with Chinese hackers for years.
Members of Congress from both parties support the conclusion reached by our intelligence community. And it is a conclusion that demands we take action to secure our democracy—particularly in Georgia where we have vulnerabilities in our election system.
These vulnerabilities became very clear in August 2016 when Logan Lamb, a cybersecurity researcher, discovered that, due to a misconfiguration on a server, he could easily download records for all of Georgia’s 6.7 million registered voters, documents with instructions and passwords for workers to use to log in to a central server on election day, and software files for the devices used by workers to verify a voter’s registration. He also gained access to databases used to prepare ballots, count votes, and summarize vote totals. Not only was Georgia’s door not locked: it was left wide open. And this happened again in March 2017—during the peak of the hotly contested race for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District.
The misconfigured server, managed by the Center for Election Systems, reportedly has been vulnerable since 2014, but sufficient action to eliminate the vulnerabilities was not taken. Our Secretary of State’s Office has insisted that our election systems weren’t vulnerable to Russian interference in 2016 and Georgia was not even targeted. However, paragraph 75 of the indictment against 12 Russian intelligence officers revealed last week stated that Russia did, in fact, target Georgia. Whether our election systems were hacked and manipulated remains unknown, but it is clear that if Russia wanted to do so, they could have easily accomplished their mission.
Given Director Coats’ report that Russia is continuing its efforts to interfere with our elections to undermine our democracy (which is one of Russia’s foremost strategic goals), we must take steps to secure our election system. Currently, Georgia is one of five states that relies on paperless electronic voting computers—touchscreens that top cybersecurity experts say are a serious vulnerability. These touchscreen computers, which use Microsoft 2000, an operating system that has not even been supported by Microsoft since 2010, do not have a paper component. Therefore it is impossible to conduct a recount or audit of election results. The computers tell you what the computers tell you, and there is no independent record (or paper) to double-check accuracy. And, as we now know, no steps were taken to secure these machines before 2016, and little (if anything) has been done since.
The best path forward is to move to a paper-based system. Cyber-security experts recommend hand-marked paper ballots with optical scanners to read the ballots and tally the results. This process would eliminate unsecure computers and ensure that, if necessary, we could conduct accurate recounts with the paper ballots.
Securing our democratic processes from foreign interference will require bipartisan support and cooperation because, ultimately, any hostile interference by foreign actors or countries such as Russia affects every person, regardless of political party. Georgia’s entire election system was undeniably vulnerable in 2016, and we cannot let that stand for 2018. As a constituent told me recently, “I should only have to focus on the integrity of the person I am voting for, not the integrity of the system I am using to vote.” Surely we can agree on that.
About Author
Teri
Teri Anulewicz is a Democrat who represents House District 42 in the Georgia General Assembly. She previously spent nearly a decade on the Smyrna City Council. A native New Orleanian and quasi-Texan, Teri graduated from Agnes Scott College in 1998. She's been a front page contributor since 2015, and she compiles each Tuesday's Morning Reads.
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Thanks for taking the time to write this. I was wondering what was your take on mail in paper ballots? It seems to me that would be better than even the old Opti Scan ballot counters we used to use.
Read the sordid history of the GA electronic voting machine. It’s not all tin foil hat. Vote count manipulation from our own state governments is a high possibility. https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-machine-vendors-87278fdb0cdf
Really serious issues raised about our elections. Too bad it got drowned out by big guns, big trucks and mindless racist threats against black and brown people. This nation and state have really serious issues that need to be debated and acted upon but in the current environment we get a steady stream of “us verses them” tweets and commercial.
I just finished a study about arguments. New rule, don’t just say what you believe, say why you believe it and then go back and read what you wrote two times.
Another component of a secure voting system is that voters need to prove that they are indeed registered to vote with another, valid, piece of paper.
I’m not sure how helpful that would be. You actually create more opportunities for valid voters to be denied than you would catching anyone trying to fake it.
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It is very hard to impersonate someone to vote and get away with it. You have to know the person’s name and address, where they vote, hope they didn’t show up before you, hope none of the poll workers know them, commit a felony by signing the affidavit, and then you have to be pretty sure that person would have voted differently than your preference, all to change one vote?
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The times it happens it is almost always a poll worker error- checking off the wrong name on the list, usually it’s a ‘Jr’, or a ‘Mr.’ rather than a ‘Mrs’, that kind of thing.
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The possibility of wholesale changing of votes via software vulnerabilities or glitches is certainly much more of a problem. Even the ScanTron type ballot readers use software and so are not immune from issues, but at least you have a paper ballot you can use to audit. You could randomly audit a certain number of precincts, and anything closer that 1% or something.
Don’t forget the effort of obtaining and possible crimes associated with presenting a forged state picture.
ID.
I don’t think picture ID’s help anything either. It’s the same problem- you are asking a poll worker to possibly deny someone a ballot because they don’t look enough like a picture that might have been taken 10 years ago. Under what circumstances is a poll worker going to do that? You would have to look dramatically different than your picture, like maybe a different race? And I think that is at least partly at the root of that whole program; some people are afraid that minorities are impersonating white voters (and anyway a little extra hurdle for poor/disenfranchised people is an extra bonus.) I think realistically that is the only scenario where a poll worker would feel confident enough to actually challenge a person based on their picture.
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Tanning, hair color, tattoos, chemotherapy, glasses, botox, tinted contacts, weight loss/gain… a person shouldn’t be denied a ballot for any reason like that. But Juan Rodriguez is unlikely to show up pretending to be Chad Lillywhite anyway, so it’s an extra hurdle for some voters and red meat to make the paranoid feel a little better.
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Finally, are there any repercussions for a poll worker who challenges voters just because he doesn’t like them? That should be a part of the law too.
Picture or not, Dave’s right that someone would have to forge or steal some form of officially-issued ID, in addition to all else laid out above. That was one of the arguments against needing picture ID back when we had that battle.