Election reform activists sued Georgia officials on July 3 demanding its highly questioned statewide elections system be immediately retired. Four days later, technicians at Kennesaw State University, which administers the state’s elections, destroyed a key piece of evidence — wiping clean an elections management server.
The server, holding data on Georgia’s 6.7 million voters and files used to stage elections, had been exposed on the open internet for at least six months until early June. A security expert, Logan Lamb, first alerted officials to the gaping vulnerability in August 2016 but it had gone unpatched.
Why preserve the data?
It’s necessary to know whether the server might have been hacked and the outcome of last November’s election and a special House of Representatives vote on June 20 altered. Data on the server included passwords used by county officials to access elections management files.
How did the Associated Press learn of the data destruction?
It obtained a Sept. 18 email written by an assistant state attorney general to lawyers in the case. The AP also was given 180 pages of email exchanges of election administrators obtained in an open records request. The documents confirmed the irretrievable deletion not just of the main server but also of two backups on Aug. 9.
Who ordered the server wiped?
