Computer Experts Petition Georgia For More Transparency In Voting Systems

EAST COBB, GA -- In the wake of the late-night debacle that paralyzed the processing of ballots in Fulton County during the April 18 special election, 20 computer experts from across the nation have written to Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp to implore him to update the state's voting apparatus.

The petition comes amid a Fulton County investigation into a technical snafu that delayed election results in the 6th District race between 18 candidates, including Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel, who will face each other in a June runoff.

The experts, which include computer science professors from Georgia Tech, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and a former president of the Association for Computing Machinery, are also inquiring about a March 1 breach of the voting database at Kennesaw State University’s Center for Elections. The Federal Bureau of Investigations concluded that no laws were broken in the incident, which Patch previously reported.

The 6th District election was plagued by several glitches and mishaps, including the theft of voting equipment from a Cobb County polling precinct manager's vehicle days before. In Fulton, a technical problem snarled voting results for hours.

"We had a technical error with one of the memory cards, so we had to upload that again. It took us awhile," Richard Barron, Fulton's registration and elections director, told local media. "According to Kennesaw State, it's a very rare error that happens." Barron said that the difficulties stem from using a "year 2000" voting system.

But Kemp has defended the voting set-up, saying in a statement that "user error" is to blame.

"Fulton officials are ultimately responsible for the error," Kemp said in a statement. "We have opened a formal investigation, and we will continue to gather the facts to find out exactly why this failure in training and basic procedure occurred."

The coalition of computer science experts are calling for a "verifiable voting" system, which may include a audit trail or even a paper ballot. In a March letter to Kemp they said: "We urge you to provide Georgia’s citizens with information they need to confirm before going to vote that their name will appear correctly on the voter rolls, as well as back-up printed voter lists in case anomalies appear. Most importantly, we urge you to act with all haste to move Georgia to a system of voter-verified paper ballots and to conduct post-election manual audits of election results going forward to provide integrity and transparency to all of Georgia’s elections. We would be strongly supportive of such efforts and would be willing to help in any way we can."

Meanwhile, DeKalb County officials are weighing whether to open more early voting sites for the 6th District runoff.

Nearly 55,000 voters cast ballots at about a half-dozen early voting sites across the district, which spans from east Cobb to north DeKalb. State Rep. Scott Holcomb, who represents parts of Brookhaven and Chamblee, along with Brookhaven Mayor John Ernst both are in favor of more polling sites.

“The lack of early voting sites suppressed votes south of Dunwoody, and we look forward to opening more,” Ernst said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This is a nonpartisan issue. It’s about making it easier to vote at a time when people are going to be traveling.”

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