A recording first surfaced six months ago claiming that a team copied “every piece of equipment” in Coffee County’s elections office after the 2020 election, but it wasn’t Georgia investigators who confirmed that confidential voting data had been taken.
Instead, it took a lawsuit by private citizens to find documents showing that allies of then-President Donald Trump and their computer experts gained access to sensitive files in the rural South Georgia county.
Critics of Georgia election officials say the secretary of state’s office has been slow-walking the breach investigation as it fights a court case alleging that equipment manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems is vulnerable to insider attacks and hacks. The investigation has been pending for months, and few witnesses have been questioned.
State election officials disagree, saying they’re still gathering evidence and there’s little threat to Georgia’s voting system after several people working for Sidney Powell, an attorney for Trump, copied election files on Jan. 7, 2021. They then distributed the data to conspiracy theorists who deny the results of the presidential election, which Trump lost….
Marilyn Marks, a plaintiff in the election security lawsuit against Georgia, said Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office failed to adequately investigate “the most massive voting system heist that I’ve ever heard of.”
Documents disclosed through subpoenas indicate that SullivanStrickler copied a trove of data from an election server, ballot scanners and memory cards that store votes. An attorney for SullivanStrickler has said the firm was preserving election records under Powell’s direction.
“They absolutely fell down on the job and covered up an enormous security breach,” said Marks, executive director for the Coalition for Good Governance. “They didn’t want to find out because they have been saying for years that this is a reliable, trustworthy system. They knew if they were to tell people what really happened, people’s faith in the system would be crushed.”
Gabriel Sterling, interim deputy secretary of state, said Marks is trying to undermine public confidence in Georgia’s voting system to support her lawsuit’s goal of holding elections using paper ballots filled out by hand rather than printed by computers.
“This isn’t about the machines. This is about individuals who did the wrong thing. They will be investigated, and they will be punished,” Sterling said. “We are taking the necessary methodical investigative steps. Unlike Marilyn Marks, we have a responsibility to give a good case to the State Election Board and potentially a local district attorney to prosecute.”