For activists and security experts, Georgia’s rush to buy the barcode voting machines reflects a disheartening consistency. | John Bazemore/AP Photo cybersecurity Deny, defy, disdain: Georgia election chief adopts familiar voting security strategy Cybersecurity experts are baffled by Georgia officials' handling of an issue that has made the state infamous.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is no longer the state’s chief election official — but his combative style in defending its insecure voting technology lives on.

Fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, Kemp’s successor as secretary of state, has been pursuing the same approach to the job since taking over in January: Ignore election security experts and malign any advice coming from Washington.


Raffensperger and his staff are pushing ahead with a $150 million plan to switch the state to new voting machines that an array of experts warn would be susceptible to hacking. He’s dismissed critics of the devices — including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine — as fringe figures. And his deputy recently scolded the tea party-aligned group FreedomWorks, which also opposes the machines, by saying its Georgia-born and -based top policy executive doesn’t understand how things work in the state.

For activists and security experts, Georgia’s rush to buy the machines reflects a disheartening consistency. Many critics of the state’s approach to election security had hoped for a fresh start after the past few years, when Georgia gained national attention for rebuking federal officials over cybersecurity concerns.

As secretary of state, Kemp consistently blasted the Obama administration for its approach to the issue and falsely alleged that first the Department of Homeland Security and then the Georgia Democratic Party tried to hack his office.

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Raffensperger’s Kemp-like posture has infuriated election security experts.

“His public statements on election security demonstrate no understanding of the underlying concepts,” said Richard DeMillo, a voting security expert and computer science professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

On Wednesday, Raffensperger’s office said it would provide a comment for this story on Thursday, but it did not do so.

State lawmakers are poised to approve a bill authorizing Raffensperger to spend $150 million on the new touchscreen voting machines, which generate paper slips with barcodes that are scanned to tally results. The legislation passed the state House and awaits approval by the Senate.

Technology specialists and watchdog groups have denounced the move because the devices are vulnerable to hacking that could change the results embedded in the barcodes. They say Georgia should follow the example of other states in adopting the most secure voting technology on the market — scannable paper ballots that voters mark with pen or pencil.

Raffensperger and his staff have rejected the experts’ advice, arguing that the barcode machines are more convenient for voters used to the state’s existing paperless touchscreen machines.

Election security is an urgent issue in Georgia, one of five states that rely entirely on paperless voting machines, and was a flashpoint in last year’s race between Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams. House Democrats are still investigating broader complaints about Kemp’s handling of his secretary-of-state role, including his office’s handling of voter registration and decisions about closing or changing polling places, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

To defend his planned voting machine purchase, Raffensperger released a memo estimating that paper ballots would cost between $207 million and $224 million over 10 years, compared with the $150 million requested for barcode devices. Activists immediately pointed out flaws in the memo. For one thing, it used a base figure of 55 cents per paper ballot, even though Georgia counties currently pay 28 cents for each paper absentee and emergency ballot — similar to the price in other states. In addition, the memo juxtaposed the cost of simply buying barcode devices with the cost of both buying and administering systems that scan hand-marked paper ballots.

“The Secretary’s analysis is like comparing the cost of buying a Chevrolet — plus insurance, gas and repairs for ten years — to the cost of a buying a Bentley and then trying to insist the Bentley is cheaper,” the National Election Defense Coalition and FreedomWorks said in a Feb. 27 letter to members of the Georgia Senate’s ethics committee, which on Wednesday approved a bill to buy the barcode devices.

The top Georgia staffer at Common Cause said the watchdog group had “grave concerns” that Raffensperger “has not been honest with the public.”

Raffensperger even acknowledged, in an interview with Georgia Public Broadcasting, that there is “relatively little” difference between the real 10-year costs of barcode devices and paper ballots. He said he chose the former solution because county officials overwhelmingly preferred it.

“The process has gone from bad to worse in the transition from Kemp to Raffensperger,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, an activist group that is suing Georgia over vulnerabilities in its election system. “Raffensperger doesn’t even pretend to care about a better voting system, ethics, or fiscal responsibility.”

Raffensperger’s office has also followed Kemp’s practice of dismissing security concerns by citing the importance of state sovereignty.

In a letter to FreedomWorks executive Jason Pye, who signed the Feb. 27 warning to state lawmakers, Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs described FreedomWorks as “a far-removed DC organization” and said Pye, who was born in Georgia and still lives there, did not “fully comprehend the climate of our state, the demands of our communities, or the objectives of this office.” (Fuchs did not explain how Georgia’s “climate” obviated the fundamental cybersecurity risks of barcode devices.)

Fuchs also told Pye that barcode devices were popular with Georgia election supervisors, who “understand better than anyone the day-to-day challenges of protecting, preserving, and promoting election integrity.” The message was reminiscent of rhetoric from Kemp and other conservative secretaries: The true voting security experts, they say, are the election workers on the ground, not some far-off ivory-tower academics.

Pye told POLITICO that he spoke with someone from Raffensperger’s office on Monday but declined to discuss their conversation. “As a lifelong Georgia resident,” he said, “I want to make sure my state gets this right.”

After posting her response to Pye on Facebook, Fuchs sparred with him and others in the comments. She admonished him for not giving her office a courtesy call before sending his letter and demanded that he produce supporting documents. “If you’re going to call my office liars,” she said , “surely you have basis and actual quotes to back the claim up.” She added , “As an organization you have the responsabilty [sic] to your rhetorics [sic].” When another commenter, who supports barcode devices, said it was “silly” to describe Pye as an outsider, Fuchs wrote , “We will have to disagree.” (Her post, along with most of her other Facebook content, is now private.)

Fuchs’ caustic letter and Facebook comments stunned many veterans of Georgia politics. “It was immature, it was unprofessional, and it showed tremendously thin skin,” said one longtime observer of state politics, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “If this is the way the secretary is going to run his office, he’s going to have a very difficult four years.”

Raffensperger, who has no computer science or cybersecurity experience, has responded to the criticism by trying to brand experts who disagree with him as radical. In a radio interview, he said that “anyone that believes in hand-marked paper ballots” — a group that includes the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and many of the country’s leading voting security researchers — is “ out of the mainstream .”

Marks called this charge “a pathetic attempt to deflect from his planned absurd waste of money on bad technology and to ensure that Georgia’s election remain unauditable.”

Raffensperger also argues that Georgians support his plan. He has cited a poll showing that 79 percent of Georgians prefer barcode devices to hand-marked paper ballots. The company that conducted the poll, Landmark Communications, helped manage Raffensperger’s secretary-of-state campaign, and Fuchs previously worked for the firm. In the Georgia Public Broadcasting interview, Raffensperger said Landmark’s numbers were “always very accurate.” But an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll in January found very different numbers: 55 percent in favor of paper ballots versus 35 percent in favor of barcodes.

Public testimony reflects a reality much closer to the AJC poll. In January, when a commission created by Kemp held its final meeting before recommending barcode devices (over the objection of its lone cyber expert), Georgians who attended the meeting overwhelmingly backed paper ballots and bemoaned their state’s public image on election security.

“We have become the laughingstock of the country and maybe even the world,” said South Fulton resident Wanda Mosley, “because we cannot get voting right in our state.”