Suffice to say, if Jon Ossoff loses the election in Georgia, we’ll have plenty of reason to doubt the result.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
After the surprise Max Cleland electon loss in 2002 there was much reporting in the 2003-2005 period on hacked voting machines. (Greg Palast was one and the Black Box Voting blog another. Also BradBlog.)
One of the oft-repeated stories was of the Diebold contractors sending out new voting machine files shortly before the 2002 election. According to this story, one of the files sent out was named ROBGA.ext (some extension). The stories read that as intent.
The Republican Secretary of State in Georgia refused to change systems in subsequent elections. Rightly or wrongly, Georgia elections have been under a cloud ever since.
The most interesting thing about this story is that it does not require phishing to download the files from the Kennesaw State University (coincidentally, where Newt Gingrich used to teach political science) in order to hack the software or the data. But you would have to have some way inside to inject the rejiggered files into the registration or election systems on a county-by-county basis. Georgia has 159 counties; that is not a trivial task.
Two counties in a special election reduces the number of machines to hack but also makes checking for tampering easier.
Republicans from 2000 on have preferred to reduce valid registrations from certain identifiably Democratic bases as a way to tweak the vote on the margins.
I’m thinking that the symptom of any tampering will be an unusually large number of voters moving to provisional ballots. The hassles that go on with this process slow lines and discourage voters who otherwise might go to the polls.
There certainly needs to be an audit of Kennesaw State’s practices given their past association with Newt Gingrich.
An experiment with paper balloting and manual judged counts to the standards of the Carter Center (I know that Carter Center does not involve itself in US elections) would be useful for Georgia and for other states with a record of voter discrimination and voting irregularities.
Brian Kemp, the Secretary of State, has consistently refused to address any one’s concern with the state’s voting system which is way less secure than it was pre 2002 when the statewide conversion to non-paper trail Diebold voting machines was implemented.Prior to that we had a very simple and straightforward punch card voting system that was reliable and auditable. For several election cycles after that, I would ask, after voting, of poll workers, mostly senior citizens, if there was a paper record of my vote and only received blank looks in response.
As a matter of fact, ahead of the Ga-06 first race, Kemp, responding to concerns about the integrity of our voting systems, that the voting would be fine and, sure the GOP would definitely win. One only need to ask Stacey Abrams, the Dem Legislative minority leader, now candidate for Governor,how Kemp has consistently thrown impediments in the path of her efforts to register voters, mostly minority ones.
I just get angry when I think about next week. The opportunities for messing with the integrity of our voting are undeniable.
I noted on this site months ago, that GA’s entire electoral roles had been hacked by the Russians and that the GA SOS when informed about it basically just yawned. It’s by no means assured that Russia will always see its interests in promoting the corrupt GOP. OTOH, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a lop-sided win for Handel without anyway of checking on the results. And that would suit the GA GOP just fine, thank you very much
I’m afeared you are right. But, this is one more compelling reason why the Democratic Party must grow its presence in states like this one and begin to elect more Democrats to the legislatures and to the governor’s offices.
Brian Kemp has a blank check and has had ever since Karen Handel left that office in 2010.
Also, I’ve long wondered about the prior primary election in April. Ossof was so very close to winning outright. Was there any manipulation or jiggering of the election results to keep that from happening? There were voting machine issues that evening in several of the Fulton County precincts for sure which caused the tallies to be much later than they should have been.
Handel still has the cover of this being Newtie’s own original seat in Congress.
That will make any shenanigans harder to prove from the outset; Handel is the expected winner, regardless of the current polling.
There is also the recent Democratic failure of critical turn-out. Weak yesses and lots of no-shows connected with supposedly changing demographics.
Handel’s older, whiter voters have a long habit of showing up at the polls and just voting, regardless of misgivings about their approved candidate.
IOW, Republican voters always show up and fall in line. Even so, It would be so rewarding to upend your fatalist predictions, probable though they be. Besides, Karen Handel is NOT a good candidate and neither will she be a good U.S. Representative. Voters deserve a fresh new beginning on occasion and they just might go for the candidate who seems to offer that possibility.