Just An Oversight?
A lawsuit in Georgia about reports of Russian hacking during the 2016 election just got weird:
Plaintiffs in the case have argued that data from last November’s election and a special June 20th congressional runoff cannot be trusted due to the unresolved flaws in the machines. And while the election server would have gone a long way toward answering that concern, it was wiped clean on July 7 — just four days after the lawsuit was filed. Two backup servers were subsequently wiped clean on August 9, just as the case was moving to federal court.
I’m going to take a wild guess that the data center does not do off site archiving of data.
At some point the FBI took an image of the disk, but had no reason to preserve it if it had served the Bureau’s purpose. Getting access to the image, if it still exists, will require a subpoena.
4 comments
Dang! That is really irritating!
There is hope the FBI did have their image. The best way is the way we do it in my county – machine readable paper ballots. If there are questions, they can be counted by hand.
Bryan, the tabulator machines you are talking about have been known to be unreliable since at least 2000 (see Black Box Voting). There’s no compelling reason to use computerized tabulators, especially since both those and the even more unreliable touchscreen voting machines are all proprietary, not public or even open source. For now at least, the most robust method is still supervised hand counts of paper ballots.
Internet and/or mail-in voting is a different discussion, presenting other problems, as does the availability of recounts, which like third-party access suffers from both systemic and deliberate obstacles.
The machines used in this county are optical, not the magnetic that need special pens, and are tested before and after elections to ensure they are good. Several passes are made before the results are reported as official. This system was set up by a Supervisor of Elections who would try anything, but rejected Internet voting as insecure, electronic voting machines as defective, magnetic scanners as flaky. She stayed with this system because it is also used by the school system for testing which provides a high level of confidence in the result. We are small enough that hand counts aren’t onerous.