Richard DeMillo, Columnist

Georgia's Election System Can't Be Trusted

Under attack from outside, and undermined from within.

December 18, 2017 at 12:13 PM UTC

Richard DeMillo is the Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Professor of Computing, professor of management, and executive director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was formerly dean of the College of Computing.

Election observers needed.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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It occurred to me earlier this month, as security guards muscled me away from the doors behind which North Fulton County election officials were downloading vote totals, that the reason I don’t trust Georgia’s election system is that the people who run it act like they have something to hide.

Georgia’s aging, vulnerable, unverifiable, mismanaged, electronic voting machines are famously insecure. They’ve been hacked dozens of times, most recently at last summer’s DEFCON 25 Hacker convention in Las Vegas, where a group with little experience in voting technology gained complete control over how Georgia’s voting machines register and store votes.