Response from the Coalition for Good Governance:
CGG and its legal and voting system security advisors are extremely disappointed in the quality of the report, because of its lack of depth, delayed timing, accuracy and limited scope. We are dismayed to see how little independent or robust investigation the GBI conducted over the course of the year they looked into the largest voting system breach in the nation’s history. They conducted only 15 generally short, limited interviews over the course of their 13 months investigation, and issued few subpoenas to attempt to get relevant documents. They seemed to generally rely on our Curling case documents, which should have been only the starting point for the state with their far more extensive discovery tools and authority, not to mention their significant financial resources.
The scope of the investigation is far too limited and focused primarily on a small number of Georgia-based witnesses or breach participants. GBI apparently did not investigate many of the individuals with prominent alleged roles in the breaches’ planning and execution, both inside Georgia and those operating at a national level. The August 2022 slow start of the investigation of the Coffee County breaches, now a household term, in the wake of the Fulton County District Attorney’s indictment is inexcusable.
Secretary of State Raffensperger and the Georgia State Election Board did not conduct a meaningful investigation themselves and waited until August 2022 to seek the GBI’s assistance looking into these massive system breaches. In April 2022, the Secretary’s office represented to the federal court that it had opened an ‘active and ongoing investigation’ in February 2022, but later admitted to reporters that their “first step” (a forensic analysis of the server) wasn’t taken until late June 2022. However, claims surrounding the Secretary’s knowledge of the breach and its investigation are conflicting and confusing. Secretary Raffensperger claimed that he had investigators “digging deep” on this intrusion in early 2021, but his office cannot seem to produce any such investigative files. CGG’s litigation discovery process has produced no records to substantiate that any state investigation was begun until late June, 2022. No evidence of any interviews or document request exists before Secretary Raffensperger lateraled this uncomfortable “investigation” to the GBI in August 2022. It is disturbing that the Secretary’s office made no attempt to preserve the email and video security records in Coffee related to these crimes, and such files were purportedly “lost” for an extended time, and still have not been fully produced….