Election officials begin audit of 2022 runoff; drama drags on over 2020 vote

ATLANTA — A statewide audit of Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoff began on Wednesday, allowing counties the chance to confirm the results of Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s defeat of Republican nominee Herschel Walker by 100,000 votes.

Meanwhile, the start of the audit coincides with urges by election reform groups and cybersecurity experts that federal authorities investigate voting system breaches that played out in south Georgia and several other states in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.

Election reform groups and cybersecurity experts sent a letter calling for the FBI, Department of Justice and the nation’s top cybersecurity agency to open a probe into what appears to have been a multistate plot to access and copy election system hard drives and software in Georgia’s Coffee County, Michigan, Nevada and other states.

The letter suggested that the probe can be folded into the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into whether Donald Trump and his allies interfered with the transfer of power after Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

The letter was signed by election reform group Free Speech For People and a dozen higher education election security experts, former election officials and legal experts. They stated that the Coffee County breach evidence uncovered by the Coalition for Good Governance, one of the plaintiffs in a long legal battle with Georgia over the vulnerability of the state’s Dominion Voting Systems electronic voting equipment, is one part of a larger issue that warrants federal inquiry.

Evidence uncovered in the Georgia election lawsuit appears to reveal coordinated breaches were carried out by attorney Sidney Powell and other lawyers working on behalf of Trump’s campaign to discredit the 2020 election results.

The letter warns that conspiracy theorists and domestic terrorists may attempt to disrupt other elections using the information gathered in the breaches.

“Because this plot was orchestrated by individuals currently under investigation for their attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, it is possible that the coordinated effort to obtain voting system software was also part of an ongoing conspiracy to overturn elections,” the letter said.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit uncovered video surveillance footage of a January 2021 breach at Coffee County’s election office. Additionally, the letter urged the federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency to ensure better safeguards are in place and to assess whether other elections since 2020 may have been compromised.

“Our lawsuit uncovered evidence that actors working at a national level in Washington D.C., Texas, Arizona, Michigan, Colorado, Florida and other states convinced Coffee County officials and political leaders to give them uninhibited access to Georgia’s Dominion Voting System software in the aftermath of the November 2020 election and January 2021 U.S. Senate runoffs,” Marilyn Marks, executive director of Coalition for Good Governance, said. “Federal law enforcement agencies are needed to pursue the potential criminal activities and hold those involved accountable. Further, federal oversight to secure the state’s election system is crucially important.”

The plaintiffs are pushing for the state to switch to hand-marked paper ballots instead of the Dominion Voting Systems ballot-marking devices that were rolled out statewide in 2020 and presented by the Georgia secretary of state’s office as a more secure voting method since the machines produce auditable printed paper ballots.

The coalition and plaintiffs’ attorneys have been critical of the handling of the Coffee County case by the Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the State Election Board for not pursuing “a vigorous and swift investigation.” This summer, the State Election Board finally requested that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation become involved, more than a year after state elections officials were first informed that the password to Coffee’s election server no longer worked and that a notorious Trump supporter’s business card was found near the former election director’s computer.

However, state election officials have said there is no evidence that Georgia’s actual election results have been compromised and the criminal investigation is still ongoing.

On Tuesday, the secretary of state’s office held a kickoff event for an audit of the 2022 U.S. Senate runoff. Twenty 10-sided dice were rolled to determine the batches of ballots that will be audited.

Blake Evans, Georgia’s state election director, said the Nov. 8 general election audit was successful in confirming the results, and this latest audit is another opportunity of “audit cultural building” following in a runoff that drew more than 3.5 million voters.

State law requires an audit after a general election, but runoff participation is at the discretion of county election officials. Online records of the audits will be kept by the counties for public access. All but 22 Georgia counties opted to participate in runoff audits. In 2020, the state ran a much more time-consuming hand count of the 5 million ballots cast in the presidential election in which Biden edged Trump by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Screenshot from Coffee County video via Georgia Recorder