Let's repost this from July:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...ictments-georgia-voting-infrastructure-219018
... around the same time the Russians were targeting other states, a security researcher in Georgia named Logan Lamb discovered a serious security vulnerability in an election server in his state. The vulnerability allowed him to download the state’s entire database of 6.7 million registered voters and would have allowed him or any other intruder to alter versions of the database distributed to counties prior to the election. Lamb also found PDFs with instructions and passwords for election workers to sign in to a central server on Election Day as well as software files for the state’s ExpressPoll pollbooks—the electronic devices used by poll workers to verify voters’ eligibility to vote before allowing them to cast a ballot.
The unpatched and misconfigured server had been vulnerable since 2014 and was managed by the Center for Election Systems, a small training and testing center that until recently occupied a former two-story house on the Kennesaw State University campus. Until last year, the Center was responsible for programming every voting machine across the state, raising concerns that if the Russians or other adversaries had been able to penetrate the center’s servers as Lamb had done, they might have been able to find a way to subvert software distributed by the center to voting machines across the state.
On or around Oct. 28, 2016, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev and Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, both officers in the Russian military assigned to Unit 74455, allegedly conspired with others to hack into computers involved in U.S. election administration, according to the complaint. This included scoping out the websites of unidentified counties in Iowa, Florida and Georgia to identify vulnerabilities they could use to access back-end servers. The indictment doesn’t state directly, but implies, that the servers were part of infrastructure for county election offices.
...
The Center’s servers would have been the ideal target for Russian hackers, says Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, the group behind the lawsuit against the secretary of state.
“These sophisticated agents certainly [would have known] that Georgia’s entire election programming and management system, including private voter data, was on a single central computer managed by Secretary of State Kemp’s contract agent at Kennesaw State University,” she told Politico.
The unpatched and insecure server that Lamb breached weren’t the Center’s only problem. A report produced by the university’s IT department after the Lamb breach found numerous other security problems as well. These security problems are all the more alarming, Marks and others say, because Georgia uses a single model of touchscreen voting machine statewide that security researchers have shown to be vulnerable to hacking. The machines do not have a paper trail and therefore provide no means of conducting an audit of their election results—an ideal scenario for anyone who wants to subvert an election. Marks and her fellow plaintiffs in the lawsuit want the state to replace these machines with ones that use paper ballots.
As part of their discovery demands, they want to examine the Center’s servers to see if anyone other than Lamb had breached them prior to the 2016 presidential election or a special congressional runoff election...
This might be difficult to do, however. Shortly after the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit in July 2017, technicians at Kennesaw State University wiped the Center’s servers clean, destroying any evidence that might have been on them. Two backup servers also were wiped a month later—news the plaintiffs learned only months later after obtaining emails that disclosed the data destruction. Kemp’s office initially distanced itself from the destruction, accusing the technicians of “ineptitude” for wiping servers that were part of litigation...[straight from Hillary's playbook!]