Last-Minute Election Mayhem – Hacking Accusations, Racist Robocalls, and the Usual Nonsense – and a Plea to be Better
Oh, the joys of tight elections! They bring out the best in some of us, but then there’s the mayhem caused by bad actors…
Between August 2014 and May 2016, I voted in North Carolina. That was two years of sheer craziness because North Carolina is well known for being the purplest of purple states. The big names came to town, famous people called on behalf of someone running, candidates stuffed my mailbox full of how great they were and how awful their opponents were. It was basically a continuous circus. When I came back to Georgia, I thought to myself, “Self, I’m done with all that for a good ten years,” thinking that was when Georgia would be a real purple state. But no. Y’all had to go and get excited about elections and bring all that madness here. Thanks, Obama.
Just kidding. I actually love it, and I love that 2.1 million people have already voted ahead of Tuesday’s midterm election, more than double the early voting numbers for 2014. What?! Gold stars for all of you!
What I don’t love is the knavery that goes along with this last week period in hotly-contested races.
Let’s have a rundown of the mayhem happening now:
- Someone tried to hack the state’s voter registration system last night. Maybe it was the Democratic Party of Georgia, like Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office claims. The DPG has, for the record, flatly denied it.
Hm. Remember the boy who cried wolf? Yeah, all I can think about is a statistical dead heat in Kemp’s race for governor, an office that has lost some high profile voter access battles in the past two weeks (signature match and, now, new citizens), and the knowledge that if they say it was the DPG on Saturday, those folks have no way to exonerate themselves by Tuesday. Also, this is the same office that claimed the “Obama Justice Department” had tried to hack the database previously. (It wasn’t true.) I absolutely believe someone tried to hack the system on Saturday, but given past events and current circumstances, color me skeptical that it was DPG. We’ll probably learn in a few weeks that it was a hack designed to look like it came from the DPG from either some kid in his or her parents’ basement trying to be funny or from a foreign power attempting to undermine the system. (Ahem…)
- On Thursday, the day of Oprah Winfrey’s visit to Georgia, some other out-of-staters sent a truly hateful robocall about her. I am glad I didn’t receive one of these calls, and I wish these (and other) white supremacists would locate those rocks they’d been living under for decades and return to them permanently.
- Former contributor Buzz Brockway has come across vandalized yard signs. I realize this is the garden variety shenanigan, not on the level of hacking the voter database and dialing up strangers to spew hate, but it’s still illegal, still childish, still mean, and still pointless.
Y’all, go knock on some doors. Go give a person a ride to the polls. Go make phone calls. Drive around and take coffee and hot chocolate to people waving signs. Wave back at them. With all five fingers. In other words, do something constructive to help your candidate win, whomever it is, and don’t lose yourself or your soul in the process.
I realize we’re in the midst of a tight election. (I really do, having lost my perfect voter status when I moved away, because now I get all the stuff. Yeah… it’s great…) But, please be kind to one another – including candidates you don’t like – and if you can’t do it without motivation, pretend like your grandmama is following you around with a switch at the ready for the next 72 hours. Trust me, if that image doesn’t help you, nothing will. This political climate is awful. Let’s be the ones to make it a little better between now and Tuesday night.
About Author
Holly Croft
Holly is an archivist at one of Georgia's institutions of higher learning. In a past life, she was a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill. She cares a lot about records management, open records laws, and privacy laws. Political persuasion? It's complicated. What's not complicated is that she's proudly equal parts Bulldog and Tar Heel.
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Is the hack like the hack that wasn’t a hack that later exposed KSU incompetence in managing the voter database? Incompetence with respect to system hacks and voter data security is a SoS Kemp hallmark.
The political climate is awful. GOP success will only embolden Trump and Trumpian tactics.
You dont need to wait till Tuesday. The truth is known right now! There was no attempted hack. What did happen was someone discovered on the MyVoter page that it was possible to access state voter files. It was known days ago, and was kept quiet to so it could be fixed. The democratic party was also told about the vulnerability and contacted KEMP’S own attorneys in order to help keep it quiet and get it fixed. This is what makes it so much more shameful what Kemp has done.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/11/04/kemps-aggressive-gambit-to-distract-from-election-security-crisis/
You’ve posted this twice. Pick which one you want to keep, or I erase them both.
The incompetence and duplicity indicated in your link is grounds for removal from office that brings into focus GaGOP focus on private date and ballot security.
What’s a greater threat? Refusing to enfranchising a citizen that included or omitted a hyphen or disenfranchising a voter that didn’t respond to a contact and hasn’t voted in a few elections, because its an attempt at false identify or someone could conceivably assume an identify cast one vote, or an SoS office that released social security numbers and birthdates of all voters, and operates systems rife with numerous security flaws involving millions of electors over a number of years?
That one vote, natch.
Poignant quote from Buell in that article.
I don’t understand why, since the white-hat went out of the way to make sure that this vulnerability could be handled quietly, Kemp would choose to put a spotlight on it. Was the rationale that it would take more than 2 days for the truth to come out? Or that his disinformation would be effective enough to make the story stick even with a totally different story being told?
Also: what kind of vote margins would it take for elections officials to publicly admit the insecurity of our polls? I’m reminded of the trouble in the congressional 9th during the primaries which officials responded to with “A-OK” statements. https://www.mcclatchydc.com/latest-news/article216056560.html.
Will Sec State double down on the everything’s fine line when these stories inevitably crop up after the election? They challenge the legitimacy of our elections.
If you recall he also cried wolf by calling press conferences displaying some Banker’s Boxes brimming with paper and
tens of thousands… thousands… well, hundreds… dozens?…~13 “fraudulent” voter registrations.I fully expect the outcome of this election to be a trip through the courts and it clearly should not be administered by an incompetent political hack that could crown himself governor in the process.
This very dramatically underscores why Kemp should have recused himself long ago. If candidate Kemp had released some statement regarding this event we could all take it in that context. After all, a candidates first impulse is often to make a public statement about something. But the SoS job is not that. Kemp was unable to compartmentalize here and has seriously compromised an election he is overseeing by crassly politicizing his oversight role.
As I often say, you don’t have rules or contracts for when things are going well. You have them for when things don’t go well. Kemp broke the rules here by publicizing this issue. He either: A) Didn’t expect any issues that would cause him a conflict. (Wrong.)
B) Always intended to help himself if possible. (Bad.)
C) Got bad advice. (Likely. Bad.)
D) Is unable to distinguish between political advantage and working for us. (Very bad.)
E) All of the above.