Q&A: Why Wiping Of Georgia Elections Server Matters

Secretary of State Brian Kemp oversees Georgia’s elections. On Thursday, he blamed the wipe on “the undeniable ineptitude” of Kennesaw State’s elections center. Kennesaw State officials have not responded to the AP.

David Goldman / Associated Press file

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.

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