NEWARK WEATHER

How a Coffee County GOP Chair Coordinated a Voting Machine Breach


DOUGLAS, GEORGIA—The Georgia Secretary of State claims it is investigating how a local election supervisor gave a cadre of 2020 election truthers improper access to an election computer system, in what initially seemed like the latest example of rogue actors misusing their government positions to cast doubt on President Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.

But that investigation may expose a far more sinister plot than previously suspected.

According to text messages obtained by The Daily Beast, the covert access granted to Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall and his technical team was actually part of a coordinated effort to find election irregularities. And the effort, it turns out, was led by a local elections official and the chair of the rural county’s Republican Party—who was also one of former President Donald Trump’s infamous slate of fake electors.

Last month, The Washington Post revealed that the Secretary of State’s office was investigating the matter. But the previously unreported text messages shed new light on who arranged the possibly illegal access to the computer and who was on the team that traveled south to do it. The Secretary of State’s office is already fighting off a lawsuit over the security of the state’s voting machines and may face tough questions before a federal judge next week, given that the Coffee County incident demonstrates the state’s inability to keep its machines off limits.

The situation has election cybersecurity experts concerned about the actual danger to election systems posed by these vigilante expeditions, which are mainly driven by disproven conspiracy theories.

“Everything we have seen so far shows that the people who have been doing this have no fucking skills. You have an elephant in a porcelain store. They can accidentally install malware, accidentally cause all kinds of havoc,” said Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer programmer with extensive experience analyzing election systems.

The text messages acquired by The Daily Beast show two separate conversations in which former Coffee County GOP chair Cathy Latham and elections board member Eric Chaney lay out a plan to bring in a team of computer experts to access the computer voting system. The Daily Beast has verified that the conversations were real and remain stored on an iPhone.

In the weeks after the November 2020 election, people who refused to accept the results scrambled to find evidence of alleged vote tampering.

That included Misty Hampton, then the Coffee County elections supervisor, who made a viral video claiming to show how Dominion Voting System machines could flip votes. Her video fueled the quickly coalescing conspiracy theories and came at the perfect time—just as Trump advocate lawyer Sidney Powell and others launched so-called “Kraken” conspiracy lawsuits with bogus allegations of voting fraud.

While those bogus lawsuits clogged up the courts, ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and QAnon-friendly attorney Lin Wood funded independent efforts to send teams of “hackers and cybersleuths” to access voting computer systems across the country. It’s in that atmosphere that Coffee County became another front on the election denial battlefield.

At 4:26 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, as the Capitol building in Washington was under attack, another plan was in the works 607 miles away in the small town of Douglas, Georgia.

Chaney, the elections board member, received word that the county GOP chair was on the phone with an Atlanta businessman who wanted access to the voting system computers there.

“Scott Hall is on the phone with Cathy about wanting to come scan our ballots from the general election like we talked about the other day. I am going to call you in a few,” Hampton wrote to her boss in a text message conversation we obtained.

The next morning, the operation was underway. Text messages show that a group of five people traveled south from Atlanta to the government elections offices in Douglas. According to the texts, the team was led by Paul Maggio, an executive at a computer forensics and data storage company in the city.

Maggio and his firm, SullivanStrickler, played a role in perpetuating the myth of a Trump victory in 2020 as hired expert witnesses supporting a lawsuit against Antrim County, Michigan—another locality that was mired in bogus allegations of vote tampering—and the text messages show that the team headed to rural Georgia also included Jeffrey Lenberg, a man heralded by rightwing media as a “systems vulnerability expert” who also reviewed the voting machines in Antrim County.

Hall chartered a plane for a team set on copying a computer server that housed the elections management system, something that Hall, a member of that team, would later reveal on a call with an elections rights activist.

“Team left Atlanta at 8… 5 members led by Paul Maggio… Scott is flying in,” Latham texted on Jan. 7 at 9:46 a.m.

“I trust you all!” Latham wrote.

An hour later, a small single-propeller plane flying in from DeKalb-Peachtree Airport appeared on the horizon just north of the small city, according to flight records obtained by The Daily Beast. It landed at 11:06 a.m. at the Douglas Municipal Gene Chambers Airport. A short time later, Latham checked in on Hampton.

“Scott has landed and the rest of team is almost to Douglas,” Latham wrote.

Hall and the team made their way to the windowless Elections and Registration building. Hampton would later tell The Daily Beast that Chaney and Latham were there, and she recalled telling her junior assistant, Jil Riddlehoover, to stay quiet.

“I told her, ‘You sit over there. You don’t say anything. You don’t know what’s going on,’” Hampton recalled.

While others did technical work, Hampton went and bought pizza for the crew across the street, she told The Daily Beast. The operation continued for hours. At 3:48 p.m., Hampton updated the GOP chair.

“Going great so far,” she texted Latham.

Let’s switch to Signal.

Eric Chaney

The team’s work wrapped up later that afternoon. Flight records show that the propeller plane left the tiny airport at 5:16 p.m. When Hampton reached out to Chaney that evening, he directed her to take the communications to an encrypted app with disappearing messages.

“Let’s switch to Signal,” he wrote to her at 7:24 p.m.

In the following weeks—as Trump was impeached for his role in stoking the Capitol riots and the illegal accessing of voting machines came into focus—word got out about their secret mission in Douglas. The board of elections forced Hampton and her assistant to resign on Feb. 25, 2021. The official story was that they had faked their employee timesheets by claiming to be in the office when they weren’t (something Hampton readily admitted to The Daily Beast and justified as making up for accrued comp time).

But faking work appearances didn’t seem to bother Chaney. The very next day, he hired Riddlehoover to work at his used car dealership, Chaney Motors, Hampton and Latham both told The Daily Beast.

The local news website Douglas Now covered their resignations in early March. Now that Hall’s mission was unraveling in the public eye, he reached out to an election rights activist to recount his experience in Douglas. He found an audience with Marilyn Marks, whose voting rights group, Coalition for Good Governance, appeared to be a friendly audience. The group seeks to expose what it considers ongoing vulnerabilities in Georgia’s electronic-only voting system. Marks, stunned by what she began to hear, started recording the call.

“You know the same people that went up to Michigan, OK, and did all that forensic stuff on the computers… they sent their team down to Coffee County, Georgia. And they scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives, and scanned every single ballot. You know, absentee, in person, and absentee by mail,” he told her.

“How in the world did you get permission to do that?” Marks asked him.

“We basically had the entire elections committee there. And they said, ‘We give you permission. Go for it.’ So, they went in there and imaged every hard drive of every piece of equipment. You know, all the poll pads, everything,” he responded.

Last week, on the eve of the state’s primary elections, The Daily Beast drove to the small city of Douglas to meet with several witnesses and gather government records that confirmed people’s employment and personal relationships.

Latham, reached at her home, sat down and spoke to The Daily Beast on her front porch for nearly an hour but professed ignorance about any details of the team’s visit.

“Did Trump send a team? Pfft. How could somebody sneak here? Do you know where the elections board is? It’s in the middle of downtown. You could not have snuck anybody in here. I don’t know how they did that,” she said. “Honestly don’t know who would know… all I know is what the paper said.”

Latham did, however,…



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