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After voters warned the NAACP of irregularities with voting machines in Georgia, including voting switching and touch screen malfunctions, the organization filed a complaint with the state election council for possible tactics of repression of voters.
NAACP Georgia State Conference President Phyllis T. Blake complained to the Georgian State Election Council after voters and eyewitnesses in Bartow, Cobb, Henry and Dodge County, Georgia, informed the civil rights organization of defective machines.
"We have seen problems in the state of Georgia, not just in the Atlanta Metroplex," said The Root Khyla D. Craine, Associate General Counsel of the NAACP. "We saw it in central Georgia and encountered problems in southeastern Georgia near Savannah."
In some cases, eyewitnesses testified that when they tried to vote for the governor candidate, Stacey Abrams, the candidate's vote was passed on to the Republican presidential candidate, Brian Kemp, who is also the Chief Electoral Officer in Georgia who was currently Secretary of State. Other voters reported cases of machines spitting their voting cards after inserting them into electronic voting machines.
"This is not something new, unfortunately," Craine explained. "These machines are old, but it's up to the election officials to make sure the machines are fully functional."
The elections in Georgia are not limited to voting machines. Craine said that many Georgian voters who applied for or voted on ballots by correspondence had been unable to follow them with the help of the "My Elector" page of the Secretary of State.
When a potential voter applies for a mail ballot, he is expected to be able to enter his information on the Secretary of State's website and see the status of his vote. Craine notes a specific incident in Candler County, Georgia, where the county election official was not even aware that he was supposed to enter this information into the system.
So what's going on in Georgia?
Atlanta Magazine notes that Georgia uses 17-year-old voting machines using outdated software and is one of only five US states whose voting machines have no written record, making them more vulnerable to piracy, according to cybersecurity experts.
Three months before the 2016 elections, a security researcher named Logan Lamb discovered a vulnerability in the lone server containing all software survey logs and passwords allowing him to download and – if he wished – to change the software for each voting machine in Georgia. But when the Coalition for Good Governance asked whether the server containing voting data and Georgia's software had been compromised, the server was cleaned up.
Still, Politico reports that Brian Kemp was the only election official in the country who refused to help the Department of Homeland Security before the 2016 election.
Robert DeMillo, emeritus professor of computer science at Georgia Tech University, former chief technology officer at Hewlett Packard and one of the world's most respected election system experts, told The Root in August that Unverifiable systems, such as Georgia's, constituted a "very real threat" to voting for security. He explained to The Root that a verifiable paper trail was needed, because if the server, the votes, or the voting machine software were compromised, the only way to detect it would be to compare the data with the actual ballots. .
In April, Alex Halderman, another of the country's top cybersecurity experts for voting machines, gathered the press for a demonstration. Halderman wrote a program on a memory card, inserted it into a voting machine and voted four times – twice for George Washington and twice for Benedict Arnold. The machine accepted the votes as it would normally. But when the machine counted the votes, she counted three votes for Benedict Arnold. Halderman hacked the imaginary election, but it was only a demonstration …
In Georgia …
On the same voting machines that the NAACP has received complaints.
The NAACP and the Committee of Lawyers for Civil Rights under the Law have been partners in Georgia for several months and are working with voters, election officials and election officials to ensure that every ballot is counted.
"We are asking the Secretary of State to ensure that the machines are fully functional," said Craine.
Craine suggests to voters that voters remain diligent and aware of this problem. She suggests that voters take the following precautionary measures:
- Make sure the device accepts your card and that it is inserted correctly.
- Make sure the touch screen records the candidate for whom you voted.
- Examine carefully all your choices on the final confirmation screen before finalizing your vote.
- In case of malfunction of the voting machine, ask for another machine and make sure that the voting agents put this machine offline.
- If you encounter problems, call 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) to inform the non-partisan Election Protection Coalition.
And while this may sound like a wild speculation, DeMillo notes that: "The reason for these wild speculations is that people responsible for knowing if an election manipulation is going on are not of interest to him."
"What we do not want is hysteria," warned Craine. "Because it undermines trust in the fundamentals of the system and deters people from voting."
And here, my friend, how does the suppression of voters.
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