Here is something to ponder this weekend: why would anyone wipe data from an elections server in Georgia in the middle of a lawsuit and probe about the integrity of electronic voting machines in Georgia?
Georgia, for the record, voted for Donald Trump by a margin of 211,141 votes out of nearly four million votes cast.
The Georgia elections server that has been wiped
At the center of this new revelation by the Associated Press is a Georgia elections server that was left vulnerable and unsecured for months--even after a security researcher privately notified election officials of vulnerabilities.
After real evidence emerged of Russia trying to hack elections systems in U.S. states, researcher Logan Lamb went public with his story by talking to Politico.
“I was just looking for PDFs or documents,” he recalls, hoping to find anything that might give him a little more sense of the center’s work. But his curiosity turned to alarm when he encountered a number of files, arranged by county, that looked like they could be used to hack an election. Lamb wrote an automated script to scrape the site and see what was there, then went off to lunch while the program did its work. When he returned, he discovered that the script had downloaded 15 gigabytes of data."
“I was like whoa, whoa. … I did not mean to do that. … I was absolutely stunned, just the sheer quantity of files I had acquired,” he told Politico Magazine in what is a fascinating read.
Where is the wiped election server housed, who has access?
The server is housed at Kennesaw State University's Center for Elections Systems. It partners with Georgia's Secretary of State.
The University reacted to questions from the Associated Press: "After declining comment for more than 24 hours, Kennesaw State’s media office issued a statement late Thursday attributing the server wiping to “standard operating procedure.”
It did not respond to the AP’s question on who ordered the action. That is a key question that remains a mystery.
But Georgia's Secretary of State says he didn't do it.
According to the AP, "His spokeswoman issued a statement Thursday saying his office had neither involvement nor advanced warning of the decision. It blamed “the undeniable ineptitude” at the Kennesaw State elections center."
So we have two options on the table so far: ineptitude and standard operating procedure. There is quite a difference between these two.
And you have to wonder, was anything else at play here?
What the wiped election server means
The impact here is significant.
This may have been Georgia's best chance to do a full forensic investigation on whether there was election tampering or hacking in the 2016 presidential election.
There are no paper records kept of how those in Georgia vote.
And this has dealt a major blow to those suing Georgia to get rid of its current electronic voting system.
"Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, mostly Georgia voters, want to scrap the state’s 15-year-old vote-management system — particularly its 27,000 AccuVote touchscreen voting machines, hackable devices that don’t use paper ballots or keep hardcopy proof of voter intent. The plaintiffs were counting on an independent security review of the Kennesaw server, which held elections staging data for counties, to demonstrate the system’s unreliability," says the Associated Press in its story on the revelation.
The Associated Press also obtained confirmation that two backup servers were also wiped right around the time the current case went to federal court.
Does the FBI have a copy of Georgia elections server?
There may be one last hope of recovering the data from the main elections server in question: the FBI made an exact image of the server when it started an investiogation in March of 2017.
For now, the FBI has refused to say if that image still exists.
That is one lingering question here. And there are two others as well: Why did they wipe this crucial server, and who, if anyone, order it to be done?
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