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US Voting Server At Heart of Russian Hack Probe Mysteriously Wiped (theregister.co.uk)
A computer at the center of a lawsuit digging into Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election has been wiped. "The server in question is based in Georgia -- a state that narrowly backed Donald Trump, giving him 16 electoral votes -- and stored the results of the state's vote-management system," reports The Register. "The deletion of its filesystem data makes analysis of whether the system was compromised impossible to ascertain." From the report: There is good reason to believe that the computer may have been tampered with: it is 15 years old, and could be harboring all sorts of exploitable software and hardware vulnerabilities. No hard copies of the votes are kept, making the electronic copy the only official record. While investigating the Kennesaw State University's Center for Election Systems, which oversees Georgia's voting system, last year, security researcher Logan Lamb found its system was misconfigured, exposing the state's entire voter registration records, multiple PDFs with instructions and passwords for election workers, and the software systems used to tally votes cast. Despite Lamb letting the election center knows of his findings, the security holes were left unpatched for seven months. He later went public after the U.S. security services announced there had been a determined effort by the Russian government to sway the presidential elections, including looking at compromising electronic voting machines.
In an effort to force the state to scrap the system, a number of Georgia voters bandied together and sued. They asked for an independent security review of the server, expecting to find flaws that would lend weight to their argument for investment in a more modern and secure system. But emails released this week following a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that technicians at the election center deleted the server's data on July 7 -- just days after the lawsuit was filed. The memos reveal multiple references to the data wipe, including a message sent just last week from an assistant state attorney general to the plaintiffs in the case. That same email also notes that backups of the server data were also deleted more than a month after the initial wipe -- just as the lawsuit moved to a federal court. It is unclear who ordered the destruction of the data, and why, but they have raised yet more suspicions of collusion between the Trump campaign team, the Republican Party, and the Russian government.
In an effort to force the state to scrap the system, a number of Georgia voters bandied together and sued. They asked for an independent security review of the server, expecting to find flaws that would lend weight to their argument for investment in a more modern and secure system. But emails released this week following a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that technicians at the election center deleted the server's data on July 7 -- just days after the lawsuit was filed. The memos reveal multiple references to the data wipe, including a message sent just last week from an assistant state attorney general to the plaintiffs in the case. That same email also notes that backups of the server data were also deleted more than a month after the initial wipe -- just as the lawsuit moved to a federal court. It is unclear who ordered the destruction of the data, and why, but they have raised yet more suspicions of collusion between the Trump campaign team, the Republican Party, and the Russian government.
Move along. Ignore the man behind the curtain. Electronic voting systems are perfectly safe. There's no need to keep any paper records because the machines never make mistakes and are secure from intrusion.
There's never been a case where voting machines have been compromised. How do we know? Because we say so.
Liar, moron, or just didn't even read the summary?
The data was wiped AFTER the suit was filed.
Voting results for federal elections -- at the individual ballot level -- must be kept for 22 months after the election. The servers got wiped after just 8 months.
I'm thinking this is a clear violation of election law. IANAL but, given the timing of the destruction of the records -- mere days after the lawsuit was filed -- I wonder whether it's also obstruction of justice.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Clinton lost to a fucking game show host. The problem isn't Russian hackers, it's the power structure in major western nations is isolated from reality, and thus they get their asses kicked by populists. Populist left easily beats populist right, but populist right beats establishment left. Establishment left sabotages populist left, and gets beaten by populist right. The Clintons and the Blairs are responsible for votes being close enough that foreign interference could even possibly affect results. The Dems could have nominated a ham sandwich and received 300 electoral votes against Trump.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The state was being sued for having a shit electronic voting system with no verifiability, and now the primary evidence was mysteriously erased! Must be the Ruskies (who haven't been shown to have done jack or shit last year), not someone looking to cover for corrupt election officials in the state.
Hillary and the DNC paying Fusion GPS (and the Russians) for FAKE intel....
Get ready to ignore the bank records....
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Even if it were a matter of regular maintenance it would - best case - be negligent. As soon as they got sued it became legally relevant and your maintenance schedule needs to be delayed.
But it's certainly suspiciously bad timing. They were sued because the system was too old and badly maintained and secured. So maintenance wasn't a high priority for many years and now suddenly they wipe it?
Certainly worth investigating.
Manipulating voter registration records can also affect the outcome of an election, particularly in a situation where you are performing mass voter roll purges -- which I believe Georgia did. Tweaking the purge in the partisan way is one of the things that could be hidden by this.
Many voters who are denied a ballot may not choose to cast a provisional ballot, or come out to vote next time. Although this may seem like they get what they deserve if they're not sufficiently dedicated, voting can be more of a sacrifice for some people, particularly those with limited time to vote and where the polling stations are located inconveniently. If you're risking late for work you might choose just to leave. There have been documented attempts to manipulate turnout by inconveniently locating polling places.
As far as paper ballots, the obvious choice is optically scanned paper ballots. That said, I have never seen any evidence that human recounters don't perform acceptably. They are not perfect, but neither are machines -- for that matter how could you possibly know if a machine is perfect? In any case human limitations can be dealt with using statistics, to any desirable level of confidence.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So two groups of people did illegal things. That doesn't diminish this case one bit.