The email was also discovered through coalition open records requests. Hudson and Marks both noted that Stone likely knew about the breach as early as, when Washington Post reporter Emma Brown sent him an email asking about it – and did nothing to engage the board or explain to the public what had happened. Photograph: Fulton County Sheriff’S Office/ZUMA Press Wire Service/Shutterstock skip past newsletter promotionįormer Coffee county elections supervisor Misty Hampton seen in her Fulton county jail booking mugshot. “I can’t understand how people thought you could get away with this!” she said. Judi Worrell, who said she moved to Coffee county 50 years ago, echoed Hudson, mentioning a nephew in British Columbia who had seen the news and asked her: “What’s going on down there?” This thing reaches coast to coast – from California all the way to the east coast,” he said, naming some of the many national outlets that have covered the story. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) is conducting an investigation, but has not released results. Jim Hudson, an 80-year-old retired attorney, pushed the board to initiate its own investigation into the multiple occasions various Trump associates entered the rural county’s elections office, copying digital information. The brief, business part of the meeting was taken up by new elections director Christy Nipper announcing she would be certified later the same day to manage the state’s computerized elections system, and asking the board’s five members to buy a tape recorder for recording future meetings: “If we’re going to be under a microscope,” she said, “I want to make sure we get it right.” What had been until recently a group of mostly Black residents concerned about the breach was nearly split between Black and white – a reflection of the population of Douglas.Ĭathy Latham, in a long light blue shirt, is seen with a Trump-hired team of computer specialists in the elections office where they created copies of voting equipment data in January 2021. Several dozen members of the public filled a small room in a nondescript, low-slung building near railroad tracks in the county seat of Douglas, a city of about 12,000, seeking answers. Stone told the Guardian he was not sure if he ever saw the email. Their concern is not just what happened in 2021, but that the digital information obtained is now in an unknown number of hands, meaning that future elections could be affected in Georgia and in other states that use Dominion Voting Systems and equipment made by partner companies.Ĭounty residents wanted to know why board chairman Wendell Stone did not tell the board and the public about the breach when he learned about it from an email in 2022. The coalition is in the sixth year of a federal lawsuit over vulnerabilities in Georgia’s computerized voting system and is responsible for uncovering much of the information that Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis used in the parts of her indictment concerning the breach.Īlthough Misty Hampton, the former Coffee county elections director, and Cathy Latham, the county’s former GOP chair, were both named in the indictment, local residents said many questions remain unanswered about how Trump’s associates were able to do what they did, and who knew what, when. Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, called it “the largest voting systems breach in US history”. The small, rural county 200 miles south-east of Atlanta made its way into the indictment – and global headlines – because Trump allegedly sent associates there to copy software and other digital information from the state’s elections system in early 2021.
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