On the Center’s Web site, Lamb quickly discovered a trove of unsecured files-fifteen gigabytes’ worth. Lamb, who worked for an Internet-security company called Bastille, wanted to find out how vulnerable. With the entire state election system housed in one place, the Center was a high-value, potentially vulnerable target. The Center was under contract with the Georgia secretary of state’s office-Kemp’s office-to program and test all the voting machines in the state, train state election workers, and distribute the state’s electronic voter-registration database to the counties. hack, a young security researcher in Georgia named Logan Lamb began poking around the Web site of Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems, looking for vulnerabilities. We know this because, a few days before Kemp blasted the D.H.S.

“And that’s just not-I mean, anything is possible, but it is not probable at all, the way our systems are set up.”Īnd yet, as it turned out, that was exactly the way the system in Georgia was set up. getting hacked-they now think our whole system is on the verge of disaster because some Russian’s going to tap into the voting system,” Kemp said at the time. media and the bureaucrats, because of the D.N.C. (Georgia has since accepted some help from D.H.S.) offered cybersecurity assistance, Kemp spoke out against it. Labelling elections as critical infrastructure, Kemp declared, opened the door for the federal government to “subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security.” Georgia is one of only five states that uses voting machines that create no paper record, and thus cannot be audited, and the Center for American Progress has given it a D grade for election security. to offer cybersecurity support to individual states. In August, 2016, when the scope of the Russian hacking effort was becoming clear to President Obama-and as he and his advisers struggled to find a response that would not undermine the legitimacy of the upcoming elections, or provoke the Russians to do more damage, or appear to confirm Trump’s assertion that the election was rigged-Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, suggested designating the American election system as “critical infrastructure,” a category that includes bridges and the power grid. And, though not going so far as to say that Russian interference is “all a big hoax,” as Trump has, Kemp has been an outspoken advocate of not taking the whole thing so seriously. But, for the past two years, Kemp has been contemptuous of efforts by the D.H.S. (The indictment said that the hackers also looked at county Web sites in Iowa and Florida.) In one sense, this was an unremarkable fact: the top cybersecurity official in the Department of Homeland Security, Jeanette Manfra, told Congress in April that Russians hackers had likely targeted every state’s systems in 2016. The indictment also revealed-for the first time-that the Russians had targeted county Web sites in Georgia, looking for election-related vulnerabilities. This issue of election security became newly relevant for Georgia on July 13th, five days before Trump tweeted his endorsement of Kemp, when Robert Mueller, the special counsel, issued an indictment accusing twelve Russian military-intelligence officers of hacking the computers and e-mail accounts of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff and Democratic Party operatives during the 2016 election. They are so closely aligned politically that the New York Times called the President’s endorsement “unexpected.” And, though it’s possible that Trump split the difference by focussing on the candidates’ most significant policy disagreement-Kemp is a vociferous critic of the Affordable Care Act, and Cagle wants to expand Medicaid in Georgia-he also happened to endorse a candidate whose views on election hacking and Russian meddling most reflect his own. Last week, when Donald Trump endorsed Brian Kemp over Casey Cagle in Georgia’s Republican-gubernatorial-primary runoff election-which takes place on Tuesday-it looked like the President was simply choosing the candidate who was running as the self-proclaimed “politically incorrect conservative.” But, in fact, there is very little political distance between Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, and Cagle, the lieutenant governor: both are avowed right-wing Christians who extol the blessed trinity of school choice, the elimination of abortion rights, and the primacy of the Second Amendment, and both are vocal supporters of Trump. He will be the Republican candidate for governor. After this post was published, Brian Kemp won the primary.

Trinity avowed