padding-top: 0; I dont know how they did that, she said. chevron.removeClass('fa-chevron-up'); There is no estimate on reopen time. Elections Board after forced resignations, Teens arrested after 11 injured in South Carolina park shooting, Former South Georgia State College president passes away. Use the table below to view the total number of each type of county in Georgia following the 2020 election as well as the overall percentage of the state population located in each county type. Start the day with the top stories from the US, plus the days must-reads from across the Guardian. In a letter to federal officials, a liberal-leaning group highlighted testimony to the House Jan. 6 committee that described then-President Trump attending a meeting about the plan in December 2020. }. } The next day, Chaney asked her to switch to Signal, the encrypted messaging app, according to the messages. Surveillance footage shows Latham escorting operatives working with former Trump attorney Sidney Powell through the front door of the county's election office. Get live updates here and runoff results by county. We basically had the entire elections committee there, he added. Click here to contact us for media inquiries, and please donate here to support our continued expansion. chevron.addClass('fa-chevron-down'); Now that Halls mission was unraveling in the public eye, he reached out to an election rights activist to recount his experience in Douglas. The Daily Beast has verified that the conversations were real and remain stored on an iPhone. Example video title will go here for this video. EMAIL [email protected] CALL (404) 656-2871. Hampton said she could not remember when the visit occurred or what Hall and the others did when they were there. text-align: center; The Secretary of States and Coffee Countys claims that they knew nothing about this alleged unauthorized access will not withstand scrutiny, Marks told The Daily Beast. And they said: We give you permission. Barnes, who is no longer employed by Coffee County, could not be reached. Our panel breaks down the ruling, the political implications, and the future of abortion access in Georgia. Were getting to the point where this is happening at an alarming rate, Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center, said in an interview on Thursday. display: block; She said she could not recall the circumstances of his visit. Filing deadlines for 2024 presidential candidates will come in the next six months, in most states. Ballotpedia regularly tests our sample ballot's accuracy by looking up addresses on both it and the official sample ballot and comparing the lookup results from both tools. RELATED:'Ethical mess' | Georgia's 'fake' Trump electors turn on each other, Fulton DA says. ADDRESS. Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into meddling in the 2020 election. You dont say anything. In 2016, I declared I am your voice, Trump said last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a line he repeated at his first 2024 campaign rally, in Waco, Texas, a few weeks later. @media only screen and (max-width: 500px) { Insider threat, while always part of the threat matrix, is now a reality in elections, said Matt Masterson, who previously served as a senior U.S. cybersecurity official tracking 2020 election integrity for the Department of Homeland Security. Hampton told them that rogue election officials could have flipped votes in other jurisdictions and that ballots could have been scanned and counted multiple times, according to the minutes. .mobile-app-cta { Report: Atlanta jury in Trump, 2020 election investigation recommended multiple indictments, Testimony ties Trump to Coffee County breach. The teams work wrapped up later that afternoon. A two-minute and thirty-six-second snippet of that call was presented to a federal judge in a case led by Marks voting rights group. Hampton, who was hired by the board, said she was accompanied during Halls visit by the fifth member, Eric Chaney. State executives | Even more coincidentally, Coffee County has deleted all emails of their election officials from that period, and improperly gave Secretary Raffenspergers office all of their 2020 electronic election records, wiping the county clean of evidence of what occurred. #SPDTraffic ROAD CLOSURE: Coffee Bluff Road is closed to all traffic south of Vernon River Drive due to downed power lines Popularity:#21 of 159 Boards Of Elections in Georgia#168 in Boards Of Elections. This month, Michigans attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, sought the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate data breaches there. Text messages from that period indicate that some Trump allies seeking evidence of election fraud had considered other uses for the Coffee County election data and their analyses of it. You dont know whats going on, Hampton recalled. Mr. Trump won nearly 70 percent of Coffee County, which is home to just 43,000 people. Similar attempts in Colorado, Michigan, and Ohio have been investigated. The former supervisor resigned in lieu of termination.. | Mr. Wood, prosecutors wrote, stated that he and a group of other Trump supporters, including Ms. Powell and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, met at the plantation to explore options to influence the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.. How a state's counties vote in a presidential election and the size of those counties can provide additional insights into election outcomes at other levels of government including statewide and congressional races. Did Trump send a team? Fentanyls deadly surge: From Mexican labs to U.S. streets, a lethal pipeline, U.S. government lawyers fought to keep records of foreign work by military retirees secret, won re-election in the Georgia Senate runoff, Republican Party red wave seems to be a ripple, 2024 presidential candidates for the Republicans. } Atlanta, GA 30318 Tina Peters, an elections official in Mesa County, Colo., was indicted in March on charges stemming from her alleged efforts to secretly copy a Dominion Voting Systems server last year. } As recently reported in the New York Times, for example, the Trump allies The vigilante teams visit to Coffee County flies in the face of that, hence the growing pressure for Raffensperger to explain what his office has found in its investigation. Pfft. Raffenspergers office declined to comment for this report, citing the pending litigation and an ongoing investigation of the Coffee County matter. Flight records show that the propeller plane left the tiny airport at 5:16 p.m. While those bogus lawsuits clogged up the courts, ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and QAnon-friendly attorney Lin Wood funded independent efforts to send teams of hackers and cybersleuths to access voting computer systems across the country. Incumbents are bolded and underlined . What if he gets them to appoint electors who will vote for him regardless of the outcome of the popular vote? } else { If anything, Trump is less constrained than he was in 2020. 2/ 22 Apr 2023 20:42:43 The obvious worry is that these teams might find vulnerabilities and share them with hackers who can actually exploit them. Federal courts | Board Chair, Ernestine Thomas-Clark, said the Board of Elections and Registrations Office resumed operations, the first of this month. Team left Atlanta at 8 5 members led by Paul Maggio Scott is flying in, Latham texted on Jan. 7 at 9:46 a.m. An hour later, a small single-propeller plane flying in from DeKalb-Peachtree Airport appeared on the horizon just north of the small city, according to flight records obtained by The Daily Beast. } Concerns about unauthorized access to these machines could receive a jolt, given the latest assessment by the Department of Homeland Securitys Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. 2/ 22 Apr 2023 20:42:43 } And lawmakers in what remains of the Republican party have made it clear that they will bend or disregard any rule that gets in their way. At 4:26 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, as rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, she texted Chaney that Hall was discussing the possibility of scanning our ballots from the general election like we talked about the other day, according to the text messages. (Notably, all three branches of the federal government have described the January 6 attack on the US Capitol as an insurrection.). The very next day, he hired Riddlehoover to work at his used car dealership, Chaney Motors, Hampton and Latham both told The Daily Beast. The messages from a local GOP county chairand fake elector for Donald Trumpshow his plan to examine an elections computer. He said on the call that he had not received a report from the team about its findings. We scanned every freaking ballot and the elections director and her assistant lost their job, and have yet learned zero about all of that effort we havent had a report from anybody.. The Florida-based firm by then had been selected to conduct a Republican-commissioned ballot review in Maricopa County, Ariz. I think it might be prudent to see if there has been any contact between the person on the card and anyone in your office and/or if they have had access to any of your equipment, Chris Harvey, who was then the state director of elections, replied to Barnes several days later in an email obtained through a public records request. Trump officials most likely targeted the countys voting system because the county was run by friendly officials who were eager to cooperate. Mr. Giuliani is one of at least 18 people who have been notified by prosecutors that they could face indictment in the case. And she questioned why access should be so restricted. Despite the investigations timing, the board said both employees resigned for falsifying timesheets. } A Republican county official in Georgia and operatives working with an attorney for former President Donald Trump spent hours inside a restricted area of the Coffee County elections office that day. New York trial could confer new title on Donald Trump: rapist, Four-time loser Trump may not be nominee for 2024, Republican insists, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Ms. Powell did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to text messages obtained by The Daily Beast, the covert access granted to Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall and his technical team was actually part of a coordinated effort to find election irregularities. Thomas-Clark, the elections board chair, said Hampton was accused of falsifying time sheets. There is no estimate on reopen time. About Us Contact Us His spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about his interactions with Hampton. Latham surmised that her discussions may have reached national GOP leadership, which could explain why the Trump administration named Coffee County in a draft executive order dated Dec. 16, 2020, that would have authorized the nations defense secretary to seize, collect, retain and analyze election equipment. North Carolina attorney Kieran J. Shanahan filed the motion on Latham's behalf. However, that has only generated even more questions about what its doing to assess the potential threat to a popular election software used across the country. In the audio recording, Hall described the people responsible for copying hard drives in Coffee County as the same people that went up to Michigan and did all that forensic stuff on the computers.. We are on our way to Coffee County, Georgia, to collect what we can from the election/voting machines and systems, Mr. Maggio wrote to Ms. Powell on the morning of Jan. 7, 2021, according to an email exchange that recently emerged in civil litigation. Logan said in a podcast interview last year that after the 2020 election, he spent time in Georgia trying to get access to Dominion machines to investigate the election results. This week, court filings revealed that the Coffee County data breach is now part of the sprawling investigation into election interference being conducted by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., which encompasses most of Atlanta. You know, all the poll pads, everything, he responded. Sample Ballot Frequently Asked Questions, Click here to read more about our testing methodology. Im not a babysitter, she told The Post. The discrepancy was not nearly enough to change the result of the } We scanned every freaking ballot, he said in a recorded phone conversation in March 2021. But that investigation may expose a far more sinister plot than previously suspected. .sample-ballot-mobile-promo, .mobile-app-cta { if (typeof VoterInfobyState_Toggle === 'undefined') { SAVANNAH, Ga. (WTOC) - Coffee Bluff Road is closed to all traffic south of Vernon River Drive due to downed power lines across the road, according to Savannah police. In December 2020, plaintiffs in a lawsuit in Antrim County, Mich., were permitted by a state judge to copy Dominion voting equipment. Those lawyers hedged that the search for documents was conducted during a trial and during ongoing elections. The state agency is expected to face questions about this during a court hearing next week. How could somebody sneak here? It was part of an effort by Trump allies in a number of swing states to access and copy sensitive election software, with the help of friendly election administrators. Click [show] on the table below for examples: Following the 2020 presidential election, 45.4% of Georgians lived in one of the state's 122 Solid Republican counties, which voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election from 2012 to 2020, and 35.4% lived in one of 27 Solid Democratic counties. They can accidentally install malware, accidentally cause all kinds of havoc, said Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer programmer with extensive experience analyzing election systems. The official story was that they had faked their employee timesheets by claiming to be in the office when they werent (something Hampton readily admitted to The Daily Beast and justified as making up for accrued comp time). Overwhelming evidence shows that supporters of then-President Donald Trump copied Georgias statewide voting software from an election office in rural Coffee County. WebElections & Government Voting Get started To view your sample ballot, find your polling place, or verify that youre properly registered to vote, log in to the Secretary of States My Voter Page. Find 6 Boards Of Elections within 31.3 miles of Coffee County Board of Elections. Plaintiffs played the nearly three-minute recording during depositions in February and March of two high-ranking deputies to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R). border-radius: 6px; In the following weeksas Trump was impeached for his role in stoking the Capitol riots and the illegal accessing of voting machines came into focusword got out about their secret mission in Douglas. Barnes said they will start advertising that position next week. It's in the middle of downtown. We test the tool on an ongoing basis for accuracy. Latham also played a key role in the alleged breaching and copying of election data in Coffee County on Jan. 7, 2021. But what if Trump gets secretaries of state and governors who are loyal to him to alter the election machinery to ensure he wins? Latham also played a key role in the alleged breaching and copying of election data in Coffee County on Jan. 7, 2021. Select an Option. chevron = $(this).find('i.fa-pull-right'); } Hall chartered a plane for a team set on copying a computer server that housed the elections management system, something that Hall, a member of that team, would later reveal on a call with an elections rights activist. The petition seeking to compel Ms. Powells testimony notes that Ms. Powell coordinated with SullivanStrickler to obtain elections data from Coffee County, adding: There is further evidence in the public record that indicates that the witness was involved in similar efforts in Michigan and Nevada during the same time period., As a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump after the election, Ms. Powell made a number of specious claims about election fraud, including an assertion that Democrats had developed a computer system to alter votes electronically., Ms. Powell is among those who have been sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems, the company that provides the voting machines for Coffee County and the rest of Georgia. A former elections supervisor in rural Coffee County, Ga., has told The Washington Post that she opened her offices to a businessman active in the election-denier movement to help investigate results she did not trust in the weeks after President Donald Trumps 2020 defeat. They later filed the audio in court. Trump filed his motion to quash the jury's report in March. New leader heads Coffee Co. They said state officials have not found evidence of a security breach. A local NBC television affiliate in western Michigan reported last week that police had raided a township office in a different county as part of that investigation. } In response to a request from the federal judge for any documentation detailing the removal of the server, Raffenspergers office this week filed only those records in court. The computer forensics team was at the county elections office in On Jan. 7, 2021, a small group working on behalf of Mr. Trump traveled to rural Coffee County, Ga., some 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, and gained access to sensitive election data; subsequent visits by pro-Trump figures were captured on video surveillance cameras. Willis alleged that Debrow failed to inform the electors of immunity offers. They said in part, every other county was able to complete this task within the given time limits.. if (chevron.hasClass('fa-chevron-up')) { VoterInfobyState_Timeout_dom = setTimeout(widget_load_check_dom, 500); Weeks later, Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who traveled to Coffee County on a chartered plane, described what he and the group did there. Surveillance video shows Latham opening the door for people entering the Coffee County election office on Jan. 7, 2021, one day after the massive riot at the U.S. Capitol. } #SPDTraffic ROAD CLOSURE: Coffee Bluff Road is closed to all traffic south of Vernon River Drive due to downed power lines Most immediately, we were granted access - by written invitation! She is seeking to remove herself from the case because one of the people potentially implicated in the scheme is her likely Republican election opponent, Matthew DePerno. Download the mobile app to save your choices. Marks, stunned by what she began to hear, started recording the call. He has previously worked on All Things ConsideredandOn Second Thoughtwith Georgia Public Broadcasting andAfrican Perspectiveswith WUGA. Brian Kemp will skip the Georgia GOP convention in Columbus in June. The likelihood of him trying again is greater now because his loyalists are now in much stronger positions throughout state and federal government. The groups first visit to Coffee County occurred on the same day that Congress certified President Bidens victory; the certification had been delayed by the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Webstatesuniteddemocracy.org. if ($('#vis_xs_indicator').is(':hidden') || typeof VoterInfobyState_Resized!='undefined') { Monday on Political Rewind: With less than 24 hours before polls open one last time, Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock are making their final appeals to Georgians though nearly 2 million have already voted. padding-top: 80px; The former presidents participation in the discussion of the Georgia plan could increase his risk of possible legal exposure there. WebRT @MuellerSheWrote: In January, 2021, two men named Scott Hall and Paul Maggio were escorted into the Coffee County Georgia elections office by one of the Georgia fraudulent electors (Cathy Latham) where they stole voting data from a voting machine at the direction of Sidney Powell. The break comes after a long rift with the governor after he broke away from the Trump-centered party. Hamptons successor, James Barnes, emailed Raffenspergers office on May 7, 2021, to say he had found a business card from Doug Logan of Cyber Ninjas at the base of Hamptons former computer. The local news website Douglas Now covered their resignations in early March. He told WALB News 10s Gabrielle Ware he began this month. Ballotpedia features 408,486 encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers. chevron.removeClass('fa-chevron-down'); COFFEE COUNTY, Ga. Georgia's secretary of state's office is investigating whether an activist had inappropriate access to an election server in a county in 2021. @media screen and (min-width: 550px) { His company had been hired by Sidney Powell, a conspiracy theorist and lawyer advising Mr. Trump, who was tasked with scouring voting systems in Georgia and other states. You dont swap out a county election management systemparticularly where there's a claim someone had unauthorized access to thiswithout any documentation, he told The Daily Beast. LISTEN: Ed Lindsey speaks on the length of the investigation. Last summer, the secretary of states office seized and replaced the computer server in question. The Coffee County data was also used earlier this year in a presentation to conservative activists that included unfounded allegations of electoral fraud, The Los Angeles Times has reported. Sign up to receive GPB Event announcements via Email. She said she believed she was pushed out because she had made the video criticizing Dominion machines. Notifications can be turned off anytime in the browser settings. Anyone can read what you share. Hampton acknowledged to investigators and to The Post that the door was often unlocked. Both the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Fulton County District Attorney are investigating the breach. Mr. Trump won nearly 70 percent of Coffee County, which is home to just The CISA advisory notes that exploitation of these vulnerabilities would require physical access to devices and election management servers, and warns that jurisdictions can prevent and/or detect the exploitation of these vulnerabilities by creating rules that that limit unauthorized access or manipulation of voting systems.. chevron.addClass('fa-chevron-down'); padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px; DOWNLOAD THE APP The costs of election security breaches have been onerous. 2023 County Office. One such case has already led to criminal charges. } Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock chief executive who has played a central role in the election-denier movement and has written about his own teams efforts to find irregularities in Georgia and elsewhere, described Hall as a node in the network of people investigating the election during that time. Last month, The Washington Post revealed that the Secretary of States office was investigating the matter. Questions about Hamptons interactions with Hall surfaced only in recent months, in a long-running federal lawsuit filed by the Coalition for Good Governance and others against the Georgia secretary of states office. function widget_load_check_dom(){ The Daily Beast paid a visit to another elections board member, Carl Travis Peavy Jr., who would have been briefed on the teams visit. How to run for office | Find Coffee County Citizen Voting Age Population (Age 18 and Over). That occurrence prompted the Secretary of States Office to launch an investigation. They copied election software used across Georgia and uploaded it on the internet an open invitation to election manipulation by Trump allies in 2024. As recently reported in the New York Times, for example, the Trump allies who traveled to Coffee county, Georgia, on 7 January 2021 gained access to sensitive election data. if ($(this).next('.vis_widget_table').is(":hidden")) { Terms and Conditions. The Secretary of States office is already fighting off a lawsuit over the security of the states voting machines and may face tough questions before a federal judge next week, given that the Coffee County incident demonstrates the states inability to keep its machines off limits. The next morning, the operation was underway. She has reported on everything from Hurricane Irma to the Milwaukee Bucks winning the NBA championship. Click the links below to learn more: Click here to use Ballotpedia's sample ballot to find every election that Ballotpedia has on file for your address. 2/ 22 Apr 2023 20:38:26 All of them, including Ms. Latham, have been identified as targets of Ms. Williss investigation. Latham, a retired economics teacher, has since quit her role as local GOP chair and is currently preparing to sell her home and leave Georgia for Texas. VoterInfobyState_Timeout_jquery = setTimeout(widget_load_check_jquery, 500); Donald Trump lost re-election but refused to concede and instead claimed without basis that the election was stolen from him, then pushed state officials to change their tallies, hatched a plot to name fake electors, tried to persuade the vice-president to refuse to certify electoral college votes, sought access to voting-machine data and software, got his allies in Congress to agree to question the electoral votes and thereby shift the decision to the House of Representatives, and summoned his supporters to Washington on the day electoral votes were to be counted and urged them to march on the US Capitol, where they rioted. Below, four categories are used to describe each county's voting pattern over the 2012, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections: Solid, Trending, Battleground, and New. Mr. Hall said that the team had the blessing of the local elections board and scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot.. Ballot measures, Who represents me? Enter your address. chevron.removeClass('fa-chevron-down'); In 2019, Georgia .sample-ballot-mobile-promo, .sample-ballot-mobile-promo a, .sample-ballot-mobile-promo a:hover { Prosecutors don't identify the alleged crime or the elector who may have violated state law. You know, absentee, in person, and absentee by mail, he told her. In Michigan, state police are investigating an alleged breach of voting equipment after the 2020 election in Roscommon County. He found an audience with Marilyn Marks, whose voting rights group, Coalition for Good Governance, appeared to be a friendly audience. $(window).on('resize',resizeChevron); Hampton told The Post she believed that Logan had stopped by her office at some point. States must act. The note below discusses how we do that, and how you can help. }. = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. Debrow denied the allegations and has until May 5 to respond to Willis. Surveillance video shows Latham opening the door for people entering Maggio and his firm, SullivanStrickler, played a role in perpetuating the myth of a Trump victory in 2020 as hired expert witnesses supporting a lawsuit against Antrim County, Michigananother locality that was mired in bogus allegations of vote tamperingand the text messages show that the team headed to rural Georgia also included Jeffrey Lenberg, a man heralded by rightwing media as a systems vulnerability expert who also reviewed the voting machines in Antrim County.
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