In the past decade, Election Systems & Software (E.S. & S.), the largest manufacturer of voting machines in the country, has routinely wined and dined a select group of state-election brass, which the company called an “advisory board,” offering them airfare on trips to places like Las Vegas and New York, upscale-hotel accommodations, and tickets to live events. Among the recipients of this largesse, according to an investigation by McClatchy published last year, was David Dove, the chief of staff to Georgia’s then secretary of state, Brian Kemp. Kemp, the new governor of Georgia, made news in the midterm elections for his efforts to keep people of color from voting and for overseeing his own election. In March of 2017, when Dove attended an E.S. & S. junket in Las Vegas, Kemp’s office was in the market to replace the state’s entire inventory of voting machines. “It’s highly inappropriate for any election official to be accepting anything of value from a primary contractor,” Virginia Canter, the chief ethics officer at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told McClatchy. “It shocks the conscience.” (Kathy Rogers, E.S. & S.’s senior vice-president for governmental affairs, told McClatchy that there was nothing untoward about the advisory board, which she said has been “immensely valuable in providing customer feedback.”)

Earlier this month, Georgia’s Secure, Accessible & Fair Elections Commission voted to recommend that the state replace its touch-screen voting machines with newer, similarly vulnerable machines, which could be produced by E.S. & S. at an estimated cost of a hundred million dollars. In doing so, the panel rejected the advice of computer scientists and election-integrity advocates, who consider hand-marked ballots to be the “most reliable record of voter intent,” and also the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which recommended that all states adopt paper ballots and conduct post-election audits. The practice of democracy begins with casting votes; its integrity depends on the inclusivity of the franchise and the accurate recording of its will. Georgia turns out to be a prime example of how voting-system venders, in partnership with elected officials, can jeopardize the democratic process by influencing municipalities to buy proprietary, inscrutable voting devices that are infinitely less secure than paper-ballot systems that cost three times less.

The influence-peddling that has beset Georgia’s voting-system procurement began years earlier, in 2002, when the legislature eliminated a requirement that the state’s voting machines produce an independent audit trail of each vote cast. That same year, the secretary of state, Cathy Cox, signed a fifty-four-million-dollar contract with the election-machine vender Diebold. The lobbyist for Diebold, the former Georgia secretary of state Lewis Massey, then joined the lobbying firm of Bruce Bowers. The revolving door between the Georgia state government and the election venders was just beginning to spin.

In 2006, a bill requiring a verifiable paper record of each ballot, introduced in the Georgia legislature at the urging of election-integrity advocates, failed after the state’s elections director, Kathy Rogers, opposed it. Rogers, of course, later went to work for E.S. & S. Election-integrity advocates sued in response, challenging the legality of the state’s voting equipment. In the three years that the case wended its way through the courts, where it was eventually dismissed by the Georgia Supreme Court, the new secretary of state, Karen Handel, was found to have received twenty-five thousand dollars in campaign contributions from employees and family members associated with Massey and Bowers’ lobbying firm.

In 2012, Charles Harper, a sod farmer who had been elected to the Georgia House of Representative a decade earlier, became a registered lobbyist in the office of the Georgia secretary of state, Brian Kemp, where he served as legislative director. At the end of 2017, as Kemp was ramping up his campaign for governor, Harper did not renew his lobbying credentials with the secretary of state. Instead, he registered to lobby for E.S. & S. Around the same time, John Bozeman, then the head of legislative affairs for Georgia’s former governor, Sonny Perdue (who is now the Secretary of Agriculture in the Trump Administration), also registered to lobby on behalf of E.S. & S. After Kemp won the governor’s race, in November, he named Harper, whose contract with E.S. & S. ended in June, 2018, to his transition team. Harper is now Kemp’s deputy chief of staff.

While Harper was shilling for E.S. & S., Georgia’s election system was again being challenged in the courts. That suit was decided, in part, last September, when Amy Totenberg, a federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia, denied the plaintiffs’ request to compel the state to use paper ballots in the November midterms, on the grounds that their request was made too close to the election. But, Judge Totenberg warned, “Advanced persistent threats in this data-driven world and ordinary hacking are unfortunately here to stay. Defendants will fail to address that reality if they demean as paranoia the research-based findings of national cybersecurity engineers and experts in the field of elections. Nor will surface-level audit procedures address this reality when viruses and malware alter data results and evade or suppress detection.”

In the meantime, Kemp was looking to replace the state’s voting machines. A year before Totenberg’s decision, in August, 2017, he invited Rockdale County to pilot the E.S. & S. ExpressVote system in its municipal elections. A pilot project like the one in Rockdale County, which E.S. & S. paid for, gives venders a competitive advantage when it comes time for legislators to set the terms for what can and can’t be purchased. Edward Perez, a fifteen-year veteran of the commercial election industry who now works on open-source election technology, told me, “What any one of the venders and lobbyists are going to do is they’re going to be working to get the ear of the proper people in the state legislature, most of whom, not surprisingly, are not well schooled in all of the details of election administration.” The Rockdale pilot, Perez said, would have put E.S. & S. “in the catbird seat” when it was time for election officials to consider options for future voting technology. His colleague at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, Gregory Miller, put an even finer point on it. “You can actually structure that request for bid in such a way that you almost have lit up the answer as to who is going to win the contract,” he said. “You almost immediately know that only one vender is going to have a solution for that. This is where the vender lobby comes in.”

Something similar happened last fall in Delaware, where the Voting Equipment Selection Task Force also voted to replace its aging touch-screen machines with a variant of the ExpressVote system. When Jennifer Hill, at Common Cause Delaware, a government-accountability group, obtained all the bids from a public-records request, she found that “the Department of Elections had pretty much tailored the request for proposal in a way that eliminated venders whose primary business was to sell paper-ballot systems.” Hill also noted that a lobbyist for E.S. & S., who was “well-connected in the state,” helped “to shepherd this whole thing through.” Elaine Manlove, the Delaware elections director, told me that the twelve members of the election task force each independently concluded that ExpressVote was the best system for the state. “It’s not a big change for Delaware voters,” she said. “They’re voting on the screen, just like they do now.” (A representative from E.S. & S. told me that the the company “follows all state and federal guidelines for procurement of government contracts.”)