brian kemp sos gov

hardworking ams pac herschel walker

stole 2018 election voter ID vs stacey abrams; i bet fla is sad about //

tried mirror crypto lie ~ dems hacking

see Georgia’s secretary of state; the secretary, Brad Raffensperger

election board 8 24 ?

AN 6 26

A Georgia judge lost her reelection, but Gov. Brian Kemp (R) is appointing her to the bench again anyway.

*The Atlanta-Journal Constitution* reported on Friday that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Paige Reese Whitaker, who was voted out last month, has now been nominated to the Georgia Court of Appeals and it could even earn her a salary bump.

Whitaker has been a judge since 2017, but was voted out in a non-partisan election over former prosecutor and judicial newcomer Nikia Smith Sellers.

Kemp made the announcement on Friday in a release, glowing about her vast experience and civic causes, but made no mention that she was voted out of office.

AJC deputy politics editor remarked about the new appointment: "After Voters ousted Superior Court Judge Paige Reese Whitaker, Gov. Brian Kemp appointed her to the Court of Appeals. Now Kemp gets to pick her replacement on the Superior Court, potentially voiding the results of the May election."

Whitaker is perhaps best known for taking over Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ prosecution of superstar rapper Young Thug (a.k.a. Jeffrey Williams). The trial drew international news as Williams was accused of being the head of an organized criminal gang known as YSL or Young Slime Life. At one point, Whitaker repeated song lyrics that included the N-word. Williams' defense attorneys claimed that his crew was part of a non-criminal-record labor group, "Young Stoner Life." Williams ultimately took a plea deal.

Whitaker's current salary, according to GovSalaries.com, was $134,790 in 2021. The state assembly gave judges a boost in 2025, however, the boost for the appeals court judges went up to from $185,000 now to $212,000, the *Associated Press* reported.

Whitaker is one of two judges ousted by prosecutors in the Fulton County District Attorney's office.

As Politics reporter Greg Blustein noted, "now comes the question to determine what happens to the Superior Court seat won by prosecutor Nikia Smith Sellers, who defeated Whitaker in May and is set to take office Jan. 1."

Roger Stone, the longtime Trump confidant and adviser, recently said that Georgia Gov. “Brian Kemp is going to prison” and “The federal penitentiary is [the] only place he's going.” Stone’s remarks come in the midst of Donald Trump and his right-wing media allies promising political retribution against the former president’s political enemies, including the Republican governor.

Stone is a Republican operative and commentator who has a history of bigoted, misogynistic, and violent rhetoric. He was convicted of numerous felonies and had his sentence commuted by then-President Donald Trump.

Stone is a longtime adviser of Trump’s and has said he's known the former president for more than 40 years. Axios and CNN reported in March that Stone is a regular presence at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. He has also hosted Trump officials like Alina Habba and Jason Miller on his radio show.

Trump has also repeatedly attacked Kemp this month, calling him “a bad guy” and “disloyal.”

Around the time that Trump reignited his attacks on Kemp, Stone signaled something even darker: The Trump confidant indicated that the governor will end up in prison.

Stone wrote on August 4 on social media: “Trump won Georgia and it was stolen and Brian Kemp is going to prison. The lowest form of life known to man. A true piece of shit.” He also wrote: “Stacy Abrams beat Kemp's ass. and he knows it. The federal penitentiary is only place he's going.”

Stone also wrote last September: “Kemp likely stole his election over Stacey Abrams which is why he doesn't want us looking too closely at the 2020 Election. I never want to believe it, but now I do.”

Laura Loomer, the extremist commentator who has been repeatedly cited and praised by Trump, has also attacked Kemp as “a fraud and a RINO crook.”

3 24 kpfa anti- union bill

3 23

https://www.alternet.org/brian-kemp-republicans/

GA legis law to remove DA's ?! spkr? sponsor fake elector scheme??!

2024 MOST EXP IN WORLD

ATLANTA (AP) — The second of two new nuclear reactors in Georgia has entered commercial operation, capping a project that cost billions more and took years longer than originally projected.

Georgia Power Co. and fellow owners announced the milestone Monday for Plant Vogtle’s Unit 4, which joins an earlier new reactor southeast of Augusta in splitting atoms to make carbon-free electricity.

Unit 3 began commercial operation last summer, joining two older reactors that have stood on the site for decades. They’re the first two nuclear reactors built in the United States in decades.

The new Vogtle reactors are currently projected to cost Georgia Power and three other owners $31 billion, according to calculations by The Associated Press. Add in $3.7 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid Vogtle owners to walk away from construction, and the total nears $35 billion.

Electric customers in Georgia already have paid billions for what may be the most expensive power plant ever. The reactors were originally projected to cost $14 billion and be completed by 2017.

Utilities and their political supporters on Monday hailed the plant’s completion. Georgia Gov Brian Kemp proclaimed he was “thankful for this historic achievement by Georgia Power and its partners.” Chris Womack, CEO of Atlanta-based Southern Co., which owns Georgia Power, argues Vogtle will make the state’s electrical grid more reliable and resilient and help the utility meet its goal of zeroing out carbon emissions by 2050.

Donald Trump’s Tuesday night, November 15 announcement that he plans to seek the 2024 GOP presidential nomination comes at a time when the former president is facing a variety of investigations, from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to New York State Attorney General Letitia James to Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis. Some of the Trump-related probes are civil; others are criminal, including Willis’.

The Fulton County DA is conducting a criminal investigation of Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia, one of the swing states that President Joe Biden won. So far, Willis’ investigation has not resulted in any type of indictment for Trump or any of his allies.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp plays an important role in Willis’ probe, as he was among the conservative Republicans who famously pushed back against the Big Lie, acknowledged that Biden won Georgia fair and square, and favored the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory in the Peach State.

READ MORE: **George Conway: Trump 'will be convicted of multiple felonies'**

On November 15, according to NBC News reporters Summer Concepcion and Blayne Alexander, Kemp “testified…. before the special grand jury” in Georgia that is “investigating possible 2020 election inference by former President Donald Trump and his allies.”

“The grand jury, impaneled as part of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ investigation into the 2020 election, is interested in speaking with Kemp about alleged efforts by Trump White House officials and allies to pressure him into overturning the results in the battleground state amid the then-president’s false claims of widespread election fraud,” Concepcion and Alexander explain in an article published by NBC News’ website on November 15. “Kemp became a target of Trump's ire after the governor resisted pressure to overturn the election, including pushing back on the then-president’s demand to convene a special session of the state legislature to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in the state.”

Trump, Concepcion and Alexander note, has vehemently attacked Kemp and told Fox News he was “ashamed” that he endorsed Kemp’s gubernatorial campaign in 2018.

Regardless, 2022 has been a great year politically for Kemp, who was aggressively challenged by Trump-backed former Sen. David Perdue in a Republican gubernatorial primary. Perdue campaigned on the Big Lie, making the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump and relentlessly attacking Kemp for saying otherwise. But Perdue’s Senate campaign went down in flames when Kemp defeated him by a staggering 52 percent in that primary.

Kemp entered the general election with considerable momentum, taking on Democrat Stacey Abrams in the general election. Abrams is a major rock star in the Democratic Party, but in the end, Kemp defeated her by 8 percent.Although Trump has often slammed Kemp as a RINO (Republican In Name Only), that didn’t prevent the conservative Georgia governor from defeating a well-known Democrat who has a lot of clout in her party. In contrast, a long list of Trump-backed MAGA candidates and election deniers — from Kari Lake in Arizona to Tudor Dixon in Michigan to Dan Cox in Maryland — went down in defeat in the 2022 midterms.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, another conservative non-MAGA Republican who Trump has lambasted for rejecting the Big Lie, also enjoyed a decisive reelection victory on November 8. Raffensperger and members of his family have been facing death threats from Trump supporters for maintaining that Biden legitimately won Georgia in 2020.

READ MORE:**Fact checkers rebuff Trump’s claim of stopping a 2018 'steal' for Ron DeSantis**

trump retaliation fail; endorse 3 gop not opposed to goose win-loss record

penn wacko mastriano dominionist but

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05**/brian-kemp**-2657387890/

raffensberger win

kos an 11 21

As Donald Trump has consolidated power in the Republican Party this year, his slow-but-steady takeover has sometimes masked the overwhelming creep of extremism into every corner of the Republican Party.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's embrace of Herschel Walker this week as the establishment pick to win back Georgia's Senate seat is a perfect example.

On the one hand, McConnell's cowardly cave to Trump's chosen candidate is such a laughable outcome for a guy who's hailed as a "master tactician" and repeatedly told reporters that his only red line for candidates was electability. While Walker is potentially electable in today's Republican Party, his open struggle with mental illness and alleged history of abusing women makes him a wounded candidate right out the gate. Whatever Walker's upsides might be, he isn't who you pick if ensuring electoral success is truly your North Star.

Lurking just one layer beneath McConnell's acquiescence to Trump's demands is the unmistakable surrender of the establishment wing of the GOP to Trump. He is 100% calling the shots now about the Grand Old Party's future, and there's no pretending otherwise.

And as the Republican establishment bows to Trump, his manifest dominance of the party has also convinced candidates running for critical seats that no amount of personal baggage is prohibitive. In fact, men with violent histories are flocking to Republican primaries, often earning Trump's endorsement. That is the case not only for Walker, but also Sean Parnell, an Army veteran running for Pennsylvania's open Senate seat. Parnell, who won Trump's early backing partly by pushing a fraudit of the Keystone State's 2020 election results, is in the middle of a contentious divorce and custody battle over his three children. Parnell's estranged wife once called 911 during a domestic dispute, and also secured two temporary protective orders against him as their marriage crumbled. According to the **Pittsburgh Post-Gazette**, temporary orders only require a hearing with the accuser; making them permanent would have required a judge to hear from both parties, which never happened.

But now Senate Republicans are in the position of potentially fielding two Trump acolytes, each with a mountain of personal baggage that hasn't even been fully mined, in two seats that will surely play a role in deciding the fate of the upper chamber.

Trump also might play an outsized role in mucking up the reelection of a man he despises: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. This week, we learned that former GOP Sen. David Perdue, who Trump campaigned for in the run up to the state's January runoffs, might mount a primary challenge to Kemp.Trump would love nothing more than to knock off Kemp, who he blames for not overturning the state's 2020 election results.

Perdue's potential entrance is already radicalizing the race on the Republican side and will surely continue to do so. On Friday, Kemp announced that Georgia was suing President Joe Biden over his vaccine mandate for federal contractors. It's a clear bid to cater to Trump's fringe anti-mitigation, pro-pandemic base—setting up a telling trajectory for a Kemp-Purdue primary that could hamstring Republicans in the general election. On top of that, if Perdue does enter the gubernatorial race, he will lean heavily on the support of Trump, who will spend his every waking breath grousing about 2020 and the supposedly stolen election in Georgia. The net effect would be months of Trump constantly reminding his voters that Georgia elections aren't secure, and that their vote may not even matter in the end. That's on top of the fact that Trump voters already decided to stay home the last time Perdue was on the ballot.

Beyond Trump's impact at the federal and state level, his toxicity is also permeating local elections. Buzzfeed News reports that at least a dozen Republicans who attended Trump's Jan. 6 festivities at the Capitol are on the ballot for next week's elections. They include incumbent state lawmakers, first-time candidates for statehouses, and local officials—mostly running in New Jersey and Virginia, which have off-year elections. But that also suggests that the number of Jan. 6 participants running for office this year might just be the tip of the iceberg.

All of this information is just more evidence pointing to the fact that, whether or not Republicans take over congressional majorities next year, the party itself will be uniquely radicalized with an even more profound Trump bent following the midterms.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/internet-explodes-with-reactions-to-bombshell-senate-judiciary-report-on-trumps-efforts-to-pressure-doj-into-helping-him-overturn-the-election/

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has released a sweeping report detailing how former President Donald Trump and a former high-ranking lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The Democratic-led committee's 394-page document contains intricate details about the former president's actions in the days after the presidential election was called for President Joe Biden. A number of bombshell claims were revealed in the report and ⁠— here aresix key takeaways from it.

1. "President Trump repeatedly asked DOJ leadership to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to assist his efforts to overturn the election results."

The report reveals Trump asked the Justice Department for assistance in overturning the election a total of nine times. The call history includes details about who Trump spoke with along with dates those calls took place.

December 15, 2020 – Oval Office meeting including incoming Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue (both men assumed office when William Barr left on Dec. 23)
December 23, 2020 – Trump-Rosen Call
December 24, 2020 – Trump-Rosen Call
December 27, 2020 – Trump-Rosen-Donoghue Call
December 28, 2020 – Trump-Donoghue Call
December 30, 2020 – Trump-Rosen Call
December 31, 2020 – Oval Office meeting including Rosen and Donoghue
January 3, 2021 – Oval Office meeting including Rosen and Donoghue
January 3, 2021 – Trump-Donoghue Call

2. "White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asked Acting Attorney General Rosen to initiate election fraud investigations on multiple occasions, violating longstanding restrictions on White House-DOJ communications about specific law enforcement matters."

Between December 29 and January 1, Meadows pushed for Rosen to open an investigation into "at least four categories of false election fraud claims" being circulated by Trump, his campaign team, legal team and other allies. At the time, no substantial evidence of election fraud had been produced to support any of the claims. The report also breaks down the four key categories Meadows pressed Rosen about:

"Investigate various discredited claims of election fraud in Georgia that the Trump campaign was simultaneously advancing in a lawsuit that the Georgia Supreme Court had refused to hear on an expedited basis;

Investigate false claims of 'signature match anomalies' in Fulton County, Georgia, even though Republican state elections officials had made clear "there has been no evidence presented of any issues with the signature matching process."

Investigate a theory known as 'Italygate,' which was promoted by an ally of the President's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and which held that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and an Italian IT contractor used military satellites to manipulate voting machines and change Trump votes to Biden votes. Meadows also asked DOJ to meet with Giuliani on Italygate and other election fraud claims.

Investigate a series of claims of election fraud in New Mexico that had been widely refuted and in some cases rejected by the courts, including a claim that Dominion Voting Systems machines caused late-night 'vote dumps' for Democratic candidates."

The report also notes that Meadows' actions are in violation of policies that place limitations on communication between White House and DOJ officials in regards to certain law enforcement matters. This policy was put in place after the Watergate scandal.

3. "After personally meeting with Trump, Jeffrey Bossert Clark [former Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division] pushed Rosen and Donoghue to assist Trump's election subversion scheme — and told Rosen he would decline Trump's potential offer to install him as Acting Attorney General if Rosen agreed to aid that scheme."

After having private conversations with Trump, Clark pressed Rosen and Donoghue to announce an investigation into election fraud and have legislatures in key swing states appoint alternate election officials. The report highlights a draft letter Clark sent to Rosen and Donoghue on December 28. The letter, which was addressed to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), the General Assembly Speaker, and Senate President Pro Tempore, included a number of recommended directives, many of which violated election laws.

In fact, Clark's proposed action, which would have had the DOJ override an already-certified popular vote, was described as "a stunning distortion of DOJ's authority," according to the report:

"The letter was titled "Georgia Proof of Concept"and Clark suggested replicating it in "each relevant state." The letter would have informed state officials that DOJ had "taken notice" of election irregularities in their state and recommended calling a special legislative session to evaluate these irregularities, determine who "won the most legal votes," and consider appointing a new slate of Electors. Clark's proposal to wield DOJ's power to override the already-certified popular vote reflected a stunning distortion of DOJ's authority: DOJ protects ballot access and ballot integrity, but has no role in determining which candidate won a particular election."

4. "Trump allies with links to the 'Stop the Steal' movement and the January 6 insurrection participated in the pressure campaign against DOJ."

The report included a brief list of the Trump allies who have been accused of pressuring DOJ officials to do the former president's bidding. Those individuals also had ties to the former president's "Stop the Steal" movement and the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol that followed Trump's rally on January 6.

They are:

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.): The report indicates that the Republican lawmaker spoke directly to Donoghue about baseless claims of election fraud in his state.
Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano (R): As an avid Trump ally, Mastriano reportedly "spent thousands of dollars from his campaign account to provide transportation for Trump supporters to attend the 'Save America Rally' on January 6." The report also indicates that he "was present on the Capitol grounds as the insurrection unfolded." Like Perry, Mastriano also spoke with Donoghue in reference to unfounded claims of election fraud in Pennsylvania.
Trump campaign legal advisor Cleta Mitchell: Described as one of the earliest advocates for Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, the Senate report also notes Mitchell was a "participant in the January 2, 2021 call where Trump 5 pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to 'find 11,780 votes.'"

5. "Trump forced the resignation of U.S. Attorney Byung Jin ('BJay') Pak, whom he believed was not doing enough to address false claims of election fraud in Georgia. Trump then went outside the line of succession when naming an Acting U.S. Attorney, bypassing First Assistant U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine and instead, appointing Bobby Christine because he believed Christine would 'do something' about his election fraud claims."

When former U.S. Attorney General Pak's investigative results did not align with the outcome Trump was hoping for, the outraged former president publicly berated him and described him as "a "Never Trumper." The former president also bulldozed over protocol and the proper line of succession to appoint someone he believed would produce favorable results to help him overturn the presidential election.

6. "By pursuing false claims of election fraud before votes were certified, DOJ deviated from longstanding practice meant to avoid inserting DOJ itself as an issue in the election."

On November 9, 2020 the former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr released a memo that "directed prosecutors not to wait until after certification to investigate allegations of voting irregularities that 'could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.'"

In doing this, the report emphasizes Barr "weakened" the DOJ's policy to "avoid taking overt steps in election fraud investigations until after votes were certified, in order to avoid inserting DOJ itself as an issue in the election." His actions before and after the election disregarded the DOJ's longstanding practice.

===

sued same day? says can't count on ct, must have reform [hr 1?]

AA Dem woman jaile for dr knock presser; 2 pp bill --> 100 signed next day?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/georgia-voter-id-law

Georgia, State Rep. Donna McLeod was among the Democrats who fought hard against the voter suppression bill that Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law on Thursday, March 25 — and the next morning, McLeod did not mince words when she slammed the law as "White supremacy" and "Jim Crow 2.0" during an appearance on CNN's "New Day."

McLeod, who was first elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2016, told CNN hosts Alisyn Camerota and John Berman, "I live in Gwinnett County. We have endured lines every single election. This is just going to create more lines because you're not giving people more options to vote. And with longer lines, that means you're going to have people that will probably not want to vote anymore."

Georgia's new law goes out of its way to make voting more difficult in the Peach State, from limiting early voting to making absentee voting more complicated to reducing the number of ballot drop boxes. And the law is so draconian that it even makes it a crime to give food or water to someone who is waiting in line to vote.

"To actually say to people you can't give food or water, that's just cruel," McLeod told Camerota and Berman.

“Jim Crow 2.0 is represented in that picture,” Georgia state Rep. Donna McLeod says about the group of white men su… https://t.co/L68IvIar2q

— New Day (@New Day)1616758431.0

The 53-year-old McLeod is originally from Kingston, Jamaica, and she told the "New Day" hosts that as someone who worked hard to become a United States citizen, she is appalled that Georgia Republicans are going out of their way to make voting more difficult in her state — especially in heavily Black areas.

McLeod urged Democrats at the federal level to do away with the filibuster in the U.S. Senate and pass House Resolution 1, a.k.a. the For the People Act — a comprehensive voting rights bill that she said would, if passed, protect voters from the type of abuses in Georgia's "disgusting" new voter suppression law.

From Your Site Articles

nononwhite Georgia voters have to wait in line for hours. Here are 2 critical reasons why

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/william-barrs-bogus-voter-fraud-claims-are-part-of-a-long-history-of-republican-voter-suppression-reporter

alex h

With one national poll after another showing President Donald Trump losing to former Vice President Joe Biden in November, the president and Attorney General William Barr continue to obsess over "voter fraud." They baselessly claim the crime is promoted by mail-in voting, despite its history as a reliable practice. Journalist Pema Levy pointed out that Barr's actions are part of a long a seedy history in an article published in Mother Jones this week, describing them as thinly veiled attempts at voter suppression.

"A pattern has emerged in recent years that's easy to spot," Levy explains. "Right before an election, Republican officials in battleground states announce voter fraud investigations. The goal is obvious: suppressing turnout. But what's new this year is that this underhanded tactic is being employed by the president and the Justice Department."

Levy cites Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp as an example of a Republican who has used bogus voter fraud claims to suppress turnout, recalling that only two days before the 2018 midterms, Kemp — who was Georgia's secretary of state before becoming governor — "came out with an explosive announcement: he was investigating the state Democratic Party for attempting to hack into the state's voter registration system."

"At the time, Kemp was both the state's top election official and the Republican nominee for governor in a dead-heat race against Democrat Stacey Abrams," Levy notes. "Kemp had a history of bogus voter fraud allegations against his political opponents, and many recognized the brazen tactic this time. Election law expert Rick Hasen called it 'perhaps the most outrageous example of election administration partisanship in the modern era' and 'banana republic stuff.'"

But in May 2020, Levy adds, Georgia's Republican attorney general "confirmed what was suspected all along: there was no evidence of any crime." Republicans, Levy stresses, "have a long history of making false allegations of voter fraud, only to see their accusations fall apart once scrutinized. But airing such charges right before an election threatens to destabilize and delegitimize it."

This year, according to Levy, one is seeing "an increase in fraud allegations from the Justice Department itself — and it appears to be part of Barr's ongoing effort to transform the (DOJ) into an arm of the Trump campaign, ready to engage in a longstanding GOP voter suppression tactic."

Barr, Levy warns, is showing that he is ready to "possibly aid the Trump campaign's legal efforts to get ballots tossed during the vote-counting process."

When the U.S. Senate confirmed Barr as U.S. attorney general in 2019, Levy recalls, he was hailed as "by-the-book institutionalist" — only to show how much of a Trump loyalist he was when he "misrepresented" the findings of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation and "interfered" in the DOJ's investigation of long-time Trump ally Roger Stone. And during this year's presidential election, Levy predicts, Barr will to do whatever he can to help Trump win reelection.

"Since Barr has torched his credibility," Levy writes, "any allegations of fraud emanating from the Justice Department in the coming weeks should be viewed skeptically. Barr is using an old playbook. You've been warned."

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/guess-which-two-states-have-the-most-newly-unemployed-hint-its-the-two-worst-governors/

no lnx

Daily Kos July 26, 2020

152

There are a lot of awful Republican governors in this country, with only a handful (in Maryland and Massachusetts) taking the coronavirus pandemic seriously from the start. But most have been forced to reverse course in the face of this new wave of infections, even in places like Arizona and Texas, with the Trumpiest governors. Yet two states stand out in their continued refusal to acknowledge the dangers of the pandemic.

Guess which two states just reported the worst job numbers?

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis refuses to shut Florida down despite leading the nation in new cases and deaths. “We’re not rolling back,” DeSantis said. “The negative effects of that would far exceed any gains you’re getting. You have to have society function.” This is what’s happening in Florida:

Bar graph of daily deaths from coronavirus in Florida.

But, DeSantis says, “society has to function.”

Much the same is happening in Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp isn’t just refusing to close the state down, but is suing municipalities (like Atlanta) that have done so locally. “It was never to keep our economy shut down until the virus is gone,” he said. “And if the virus comes back, I don’t see us shutting down our economy anymore. We’ve got to figure out how to live with the virus.”

Meanwhile, a lot of people aren’t living anymore because of the virus:

...

720 an sued a mayor?

republicans turn on Georgia’s GOP Gov. Brian Kemp’s ‘stubborn’ war on masks: ‘It’s a mess’

an 620

revealed: Official files discredit Brian Kemp’s accusation that Democrats tried to hack the Georgia election

ProPub

===

djt threat dem SC? gov?

georgia Gov. Kemp offers to ‘safely host’ GOP convention after COVID-19 cases spike in his state Igor Derysh / Salon an 520

===

4.5/20

an reopens beaches?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/georgia-gop-governor-orders-several-ga-beaches-to-reopen-days-after-acknowledging-hes-woefully-uneducated-on-coronavirus-spread/

http://click1.e.alternet.org/zdzdlgfvftzkzlqqkbpffkfqqbkqvswcdtfzprgsrmmp_amlkmlslnmhspblpltp.html?a=&b=4213&c=21989&d=2

an 4.2.20

Deadly ignorance’: Georgia GOP governor slammed for falsely claiming ‘we didn’t know’ asymptomatic people can transmit coronavirus

Alex Henderson

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp asserted that the realization one can spread coronavirus despite being asymptomatic was a “game-changer” for him.

===

an 4.2.20

Deadly ignorance’: Georgia GOP governor slammed for falsely claiming ‘we didn’t know’ asymptomatic people can transmit coronavirus

Alex Henderson

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp asserted that the realization one can spread coronavirus despite being asymptomatic was a “game-changer” for him.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/georgias-gop-governor-to-defy-trump-pick-for-us-senate-seat-after-tense-white-house-meeting/

in an attempt to win back women who’ve abandoned the GOP in recent years, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp plans to appoint financial executive Kelly Loeffler to a US Senate seat next week, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

The move contradicts the wishes of President Trump and others in the GOP, who pushed for the appointment of Trump loyalist U.S. Rep. Doug Collins. The appointment is intended to fill the seat of Republican Johnny Isakson, who is stepping down due to health issues....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/georgia-governor-signs-heartbeat-bill-giving-the-state-one-of-the-most-restrictive-abortion-laws-in-the-nation/2019/05/07/d53b2f8a-70cf-11e9-8be0-ca575670e91c_story.html?utm_term=.eb8e5429c383

gov signs, criminalize women (ga has record maternal death rate, esp aa

Georgia legislature sends 6-week abortion ban to governor to sign into law

https://www.alternet.org/georgias-kemp-calls-stacey-abrams-disgrace-democracy-refusing-concede-while-votes-are-being-counted

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/brian-kemp-rachel-small-election-hacking

mirror? servers vulnerable?

https://www.alternet.org/georgias-gop-gubernatorial-candidate-brian-kemp-announces-surprise-investigation-accusing-democrats

Saying an attempt was made to hack the state's voter registration system, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp has launched an investigation of the Democratic Party of Georgia, reports the Atlanta Journal.

According to the report, the Secretary of State’s Office provided no details of the investigation Sunday.

Kemp is currently facing off with Democrat Stacey Abrams for the governorship in a tight race.

"While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation, I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes," said Candice Broce, spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s Office. "We can also confirm that no personal data was breached and our system remains secure."

...?

no evidence of course

https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/kemp-office-investigates-georgia-democrats-after-alleged-hacking-attempt/

there’s no indication that voter registration information was breached.

The Democratic Party of Georgia said Kemp is trying to deflect attention from vulnerabilities in the state’s online voter registration website.

Just two days before the election, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office launched an investigation Sunday into the Democratic Party after an alleged attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system.

Kemp, who is the Republican candidate for governor on Tuesday’s ballot, didn’t provide any evidence of hacking when his office announced the probe. He faces Democrat Stacey Abrams in the election.

The Democratic Party of Georgia called the allegation “100 percent false” and “an abuse of power” by Kemp’s office.

A computer scientist and an attorney suing Kemp said his office’s accusation of hacking is a distraction from a report that voter information is vulnerable on the state’s registration website. The Secretary of State’s Office said the system remains secure and voter information wasn’t breached.

The vulnerability could allow someone to access voters’ registration and personal information, said Richard DeMillo, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech.

“The way the website is set up, once you get access to your own voter record, you can go in and change permissions and get access to anyone’s voting record,” DeMillo said.

Abrams called Kemp’s investigation “a desperate ploy.”

“He twice this week was told by federal judges that he was wrong when it comes to voter suppression,” Abrams told Channel 2 Action News. “He is trying to rile up his base by misleading voters yet again."

How voting issues became a big issue in Georgia’s governor race

Your guide to Georgia voting integrity and access

A recent poll by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Channel 2 has Kemp and Abrams locked in a dead heat.

The explosive 11th-hour development Sunday intensified calls for Kemp to step aside as the state’s top election official even as he runs for Georgia’s top political post. Throughout the campaign he has refused to do so.

Voting access has been a flashpoint throughout the campaign.

Kemp’s office didn’t make any evidence public to support the allegation.

Democratic Party of Georgia Executive Director Rebeccca DeHart called the investigation a “political stunt” just before Election Day.

“Brian Kemp is desperate to save his failing campaign, and it's likely we'll see even more of his abuses of power as the election nears,” DeHart said.

The alleged hacking attempt occurred Saturday evening, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

The office has alerted the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The poll by The AJC and Channel 2 found that many voters say they’re deeply skeptical about the integrity of Georgia’s elections, including concerns about tampering and ineligible voters casting ballots.

Forty-nine percent of respondents saying they believe it’s likely or very likely that many people will show up to vote and be told they’re not eligible, according to the poll, which has a 3 percentage point margin of error.

Almost as many of those surveyed are concerned about fraud, with nearly 48 percent saying it’s likely or very likely that people who aren’t eligible will vote in the election.

The concerns largely broke along party lines.

jimmy c cals him out

https://www.alternet.org/election-expert-greg-palast-thanks-gop-voter-suppression-democrats-may-have-effectively-lost

exact match BS

Georgia Voter Suppression Efforts Under Fire in Heated Governor Race

https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-republican-party-has-abandoned-reality

no lnx vid

Here's Why the Republican Party Has Abandoned Reality

It's Trump's GOP now.

By David Akadjian / Daily Kos September 16, 2018, 7:58 AM GMT

This year, the Republican candidate for governor in Georgia was decided in a special runoff election between Brian Kempand Casey Cagle, the top two finishers in the Republican primary. Before the runoff election, Casey Cagle was secretly recorded talking about the craziness of the Georgia Republican primary. He said:

The problem is in a primary—and you and I are just talking off-the-record frank—they don’t give a shit about those things. Okay. In the general election, they care about it. Okay. But they don’t care about it in a primary. This primary felt like it was who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest.

Kemp quickly pounced on these remarks and used them to win the runoff by 40 points—which, ironically, validated Cagle’s remarks.

Here in Ohio, I saw the same thing in our race for governor. The entire race was about who was the most conservative. Mary Taylor called Mike DeWine a “liberal” and DeWine said Taylor was a criminal, so “lock her up.”

You’ve probably seen something similar in a race where you live. Conspiracy theorists are falling out of trees in Republican primaries.

So why is this going, on and what can we learn from it?

Politicians are cowards

Almost a year before the 2016 election, Devin Nunes spoke with The New Yorker about then-House Speaker John Boehner’s ouster.

Nunes told the author that one of the biggest changes he’s seen since his arrival in 2002 is the rise of online media outlets and for-profit groups that spread bad or even false information:

I used to spend ninety per cent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter, such as, ‘I really like this bill, H.R. 123,’ and they really believe in it because they heard about it through one of the groups that they belong to, but their view was based on actual legislation.Ten per cent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head.

Today, the calls and emails are 90 percent about the bad information and conspiracy theories, and only a small percentage are about things that are actually true.

Of course today, we know Nunes as the point man from the House Intelligence Committee who keeps trying to push the lie that it was Hillary Clinton who actually colluded with Russia. Nunes is also a global warming denier even as Fresno, the largest city in his California district, experienced a record consecutive days with highs that topped 100 degrees.

Nunes is now one of the leaders in disinformation.

Why?

Because Fox News and other right-wing conspiracy media outlets have made him famous. His fame has brought in $7.4 million in campaign donations, the most of any California Republican. This is also three to seven times any previous amount he’s raised.

So … conspiracy away!

In three years Nunes went from Freedom Party critic to one of the lead conspiracy theorists in Congress. Along the way, he threw out every principle he once might have had.

He’s not a leader. He’s a Fox News puppet.

[vid]

Devin Nunes calls his own paper, The Sacramento Bee, ‘fake news’

It’s important to understand that this is not just true for Nunes, but for most politicians

It’s easy for liberals to see this with Devin Nunes because he’s a lying conspiracy theorist Republican.

The mistake we often make, however, is seeing Democratic politicians differently. They’re not conspiracy theorists like Nunes. But they also don’t tend to be leaders like we want them to be. They have to get elected, too. So they will do what it takes to get elected.They will champion causes that are hot-button issues in the media. They will talk about what they think they can talk about in order to win. If an issue is going to hurt them politically, they may avoid it.

The simple model for what they’re doing looks like this:

Social change -> political change -> policy change

Social change is cultural change. It is what is popular in the public mind. Political change is winning elections. And policy change is when politicians write legislation.

Politicians will do what those who get them elected want.

If we look at someone saying this on the Democratic side, it looks like Barack Obama in 2009 talking about health care. Obama took a page out of President Franklin Roosevelt’s playbook. FDR once met with a group of activists who wanted support for new, bold legislation. After listening to their arguments, he then said, “You’ve convinced me. Now go out and make me do it.”

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/18/mueller-indictments-georgia-voting-infrastructure-219018

The indictment last week of 12 Russian military officers is focusing new attention on election servers in Georgia that are currently embroiled in a lawsuit between election integrity activists and the secretary of state. The activists, intent on proving that the state’s paperless voting machines are not secure and should be replaced, want to examine two state election servers to look for evidence that Russian hackers or others might have compromised them to subvert elections. But the state has been fighting them for more than a year, citing sovereign immunity from lawsuits and also insisting to the news media that Georgia was never targeted by Russian hackers.

For the past year it seemed the latter might be true.

When the Department of Homeland Security notified 21 states in 2017 that they had been targeted by Russian hackers intent on interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Georgia—despite having one of the most vulnerable voting systems in the country—was not among them. Trump won the state by nearly 6 percentage points over Democrat Hillary Clinton, whose campaign had hoped to pick up the reliably Republican state for the first time since 1992.

DHS said Russian hackers had probed websites in the 21 states looking for vulnerabilities, and in at least one state—Illinois—they found a vulnerability in a server that hosted the state’s voter registration database, allowing them to access 90,000 voter records. But the Russians were apparently unsuccessful in finding vulnerabilities in other state election sites and evidently never bothered at all with servers in Georgia, according to the agency.

This was odd because around the same time the Russians were targeting other states, a security researcher in Georgia namedLogan Lambdiscovered 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 Ccnter 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.

But Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was the only state election official to refuse security assistance from the Department of Homeland Security prior to the election, has insisted for more than a year that his state’s voting systems were never at risk in the 2016 election, because DHS told him the Russians had not targeted Georgia.

This changed on Friday, however, when the Justice Department unsealed the indictment against 12 Russian intelligence officers who oversaw an operation that, the department says, included targeting county websites in Georgia.

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.

Asked about this new revelation, a spokeswoman for the Georgia secretary of state’s office declined to address it directly, saying only that the secretary of state’s own office had never been breached.

“We have never been hacked, and according to President Trump and the Department Of Homeland Security, we have never been targeted,” Candice Broce wrote in an email. “Georgia has secure, accessible, and fair elections because [Secretary of State Brian] Kemp has leveraged private sector solutions for robust cybersecurity, well before any of those options were offered by the federal government.”

In truth, Kemp’s office would not have been the most likely target for Russian hackers, since his office has had little to do with the administration of elections in Georgia since at least 2002, when it contracted that responsibility to the Center for Election Systems. For 15 years, it was well known that the Center was responsible for training election workers, programming the state’s electronic voting machines before each election and distributing the voter registration database to counties. 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 that was held on June 20 the following year betweenKaren Handel, Kemp’s predecessor as secretary of state, and Jon Ossoff. With the revelations in Friday’s indictment, Marks says an examination of the Center’s servers is more important than ever.

“The indictment’s reference to Russians searching for Georgia vulnerabilities makes it all the more imperative that plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit be promptly granted the right to conduct forensic discovery on the remaining electronic records related to the server,” Marks told Politico.

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. Kemp later said, however, that the wiping had simply been standard operating procedure performed any time servers were taken out of service.

The good news is that FBI agents in Atlanta made a mirror image of the server that Lamb breached when they were investigating his intrusion, and the plaintiffs are hoping the judge overseeing their case will rule that they can examine this image. It’s unclear, however, whether the image preserved everything that was on the server and whether the image still exists.

A spokesman for the FBI’s Atlanta office refused to comment on the matter and referred POLITICO to KSU. KSU did not respond.

Marks says it’s astonishing how little curiosity or concern Kemp and Georgia’s Election Board have shown toward the Center’s server. “[The] Russians would not have had to ‘hack’ or force their way in. The electronic door was wide open ... and KSU’s wiping of the server logs would have likely concealed their tracks.

“[It] appears that Kemp and the State Board prefer not to know [what may have happened on that server],” Marks told me. “Nor do they want plaintiffs to find out, as they are continuing to block all attempts at litigation discovery.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/15/us/georgia-governor-cagle-kemp.html

no lnx

Georgia Governor Candidate Caught Saying He’s in Race to Be the ‘Craziest’

Image

Georgia Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle campaigned in Gainesville on Thursday.CreditKevin D. Liles for The New York Times

By Richard Fausset

July 15, 2018

ATLANTA — It has become the “deplorables” moment of the Georgia governor’s race.

In a private conversation secretly recorded in May and made public on Monday, Casey Cagle, the Republican lieutenant governor, was captured criticizing the over-the-top tone of his party’s primary. He said that it had become focused on “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest.”

Now Mr. Cagle’s opponent in the July 24 Republican runoff for governor, Brian Kemp, is accusing Mr. Cagle of turning up his nose at the salt-of-the-earth Republican base — much as President Trump did when, as a candidate, he criticized Hillary Clinton for using the phrase “basket of deplorables” to describe many of his supporters.

Mr. Cagle’s campaign has insisted that he was referring to the candidates, not the voters. But the recording of Mr. Cagle underscored the dilemma for a Republican Party in which some leaders are privately put off by the rough and raucous style perfected by Mr. Trump — but fear that any criticism of that style might be interpreted as contempt for voters who are energized by it.

The recording of Mr. Cagle’s comments released by his opponent has added additional drama to what was already aneck-and-neck race between two seasoned, Trump-supporting politicians to succeed the current governor, Nathan Deal, a Republican. Mr. Cagle and Mr. Kemp are vying to prove who is further to the right during a primary season in which Republican voters in other nearby states, when offered a choice, have gone with the more conservative option.

Setting the tone of the race, perhaps more than anyone, is Mr. Kemp, Georgia’s longtime secretary of state, who has run TV ads that feature him brandishing various guns, revving up a chain saw to “rip up some regulations” and declaring, in his drawly baritone, that he would use his “big truck” to “round up” criminal undocumented immigrants.

The drift to the right is being closely watched in Atlanta, the Southeast’s great commercial powerhouse, where business and civic leaders are loath to see expressions of prejudice that might exacerbate Southern stereotypes and affect bottom lines. Amplifying that concern: The city, like many others nationwide, is hoping to woo Amazon, which is looking for a place to build its second headquarters.

Democrats, meanwhile, hope the rough Republican primary will help their candidate, Stacey Abrams, the former state House minority leader, attract more moderate voters in the fall, even though Ms. Abrams, the first African-American to secure a nomination for governor in Georgia, supports abortion rights and stricter gun control.

On Thursday, the state Democratic Party said in a statement that either Republican candidate, if elected, would “undo and destroy the advances that Georgia has made under the Deal administration, particularly on Georgia’s business climate.”

Both Republican candidates have pledged that, if elected, they would sign “religious liberty” legislation that gay-rights advocates call discriminatory. Governor Deal vetoed a version of the legislation in 2016 after pushback from business and L.G.B.T. leaders.

But Mr. Cagle and Mr. Kemp also say they would make Georgia more business-friendly, not less, with low taxes and less regulation. Indeed, there appears to be little difference between the two Republican candidates’ governing philosophies, which may explain why Mr. Kemp and Mr. Cagle have taken to accusing each other of a litany of misdeeds and untruths, all while more secret recordings of Mr. Cagle emerge — and while Mr. Kemp doubles down on the folksy, transgressive front-porch image that he markets as “politically incorrect conservative.”

The secret recording of Mr. Cagle released on Monday was made by Clay Tippins, one of four Republicans candidates who failed to make the runoff in the first round of voting in May. In one previously released snippet, which Mr. Tippins released to local media, Mr. Cagle can be heard saying he supported a bill that he considered to be bad policy because he thought it would stymie another rival candidate’s fund-raising chances.

In a third snippet, released by the Kemp campaign Friday, Mr. Cagle says that Mr. Kemp’s ads targeted “a very rabid” audience. “Cagle caught on tape AGAIN insulting you,” wrote Ryan Mahoney, a Kemp spokesman, in a fund-raising email.

In the recording, Mr. Cagle acknowledges that Mr. Kemp’s ads are “creative” and helped propel him into a second-place finish — and a spot in the runoff — in the May election, earning 25.6 percent of the vote to Mr. Cagle’s 38.9 percent.

The ads also sparked a firestorm of free publicity for Mr. Kemp as national news outlets rushed to report on and criticize them. Much was made of the fact that Mr. Kemp, in one ad, points a shotgun toward a young male character who is trying to date Mr. Kemp’s daughter.

In another ad, Mr. Kemp, who is white, seems to acknowledge that he has crossed a line when he says he would “round up” undocumented immigrants in his truck, a particularly controversial statement in a state with a shameful history of whites attacking and lynching people of color.

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Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp at a campaign stop in Blackshear on Thursday.CreditMelissa Golden for The New York Times

“Yep,” Mr. Kemp says, speaking into the camera, a smile at play on his lips. “I just said that.”

In Athens, Mr. Kemp’s hometown, there is some eye rolling at his onscreen persona. Though no one has doubted his fondness for hunting and the Second Amendment, others note that Mr. Kemp, 54, is a wealthy businessman who grew up in the heart of a sophisticated college town and was perhaps laying it on a bit thick.

“He’s cosplaying as a goober,” one local memorably put it on Twitter.

Even so, Mr. Kemp displayed an easy way with the voters who came to see him in South Georgia on Wednesday as his bus tour took him to the cities of Moultrie, Adel and Valdosta. The crowds chuckled when he passed around a diesel can for gas money. Mr. Kemp made multiple references to the regulation-cutting chain saw in his ads.

“You know what, people are ready for an unapologetic conservative that will say what you’re thinking, that will put you first, ahead of those special interests, ahead of the status quo, ahead of those that are here illegally,” Mr. Kemp said on the steps of the Lowdnes County courthouse.

Some voters at the events recognized that some of Mr. Kemp’s presentation was exaggerated shtick, while others felt that liberal America should lighten up. Charlie Hoes, 54, a Moultrie businessman, referred to the ad in which Mr. Kemp points a shotgun at one of his daughter’s suitors, and said he took Mr. Kemp seriously, but not always literally. “He’s not saying if you mess with her, I’ll come kill you,” he said.

“I think we are in a society where we are offended way too easily,” said Angie Crawford, 52, an insurance seller from Hahira, Ga.

Mr. Kemp’s presentation is a throwback of sorts in a state that has, in recent decades, seen the rise of a more wonkish style of campaigner, from Jimmy Carter on the left to Newt Gingrich on the right. But the old style appears to be working; one poll released in late June by an Alabama-based research firm had the race at a virtual dead heat.

“I give him credit,” said James C. Cobb, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Georgia who called Mr. Kemp’s style a form of identity politics that appeal to white Georgians. “He’s a shrewder politician than I realized.”

As he mingled with supporters at a soda fountain in Moultrie, Mr. Kemp, in jeans in a pair of wine-dark cowboy boots, made the “deplorables” comparison explicit. “It sounds like Casey Cagle’s gotten like Hillary Clinton,” he said, adding “I would ask all those crazies to vote Brian Kemp for governor in the Republican runoff.”

The Cagle campaign has had little choice but to own what its candidate said on the recordings. Soon after the first snippet was released, Mr. Cagle’s campaign manager, Scott Binkley, released a statement that doubled down on the contention that Mr. Kemp’s ads were “crazy.”

“While Brian Kemp’s ad campaign was admitting that he apparently had no qualifications beyond owning a truck, Casey Cagle was talking about creating 600,000 jobs with Gov. Deal, college and career academies, and helping struggling parents who need options beyond foster care.”

Since Mr. Kemp became Georgia’s secretary of state in 2010, liberals have focused on what they see as his efforts to curtail the minority vote. He supports a state voter ID requirement, and his office has questioned the validity of thousands of voter registrations gathered by a group founded by Ms. Abrams.

But Mr. Cagle has emphasized what he considers Mr. Kemp’s incompetence on the job. In a contentious Thursday night debate, Mr. Cage mentioned, among other things, a 2015 gaffe in which Mr. Kemp’s office released the Social Security numbers and other personal information of more than six million voters.

Mr. Kemp landed his own blows in the debate, including references to the recordings. “You should be explaining the lies that you’re telling, and you’re doing this to deflect your own words on the Clay Tippins tape, putting politics and campaign contributions ahead of good public policy,” he said.

Earlier that day, Mr. Cagle, 52, had taken his case to a local Jaycees meeting at a pizza parlor in his hometown, Gainesville, Ga., a poultry-processing center about an hour north of Atlanta. Mr. Cagle, an avid triathlete, is a trim man who favors rounded glasses that give him an air of a 1920s bookkeeper. He spoke at length about ways to alleviate regional traffic problems and vowed to continue the positive business climate that he would inherit if elected.

Afterward, Bill Rhoads, 39, a local lawyer, declared himself “undecided,” but said he could not vote for Mr. Kemp. He said that in past years, the secretary of state’s office had been exceedingly slow in issuing business licenses. He also agreed with Mr. Cagle’s assertion that ads like Mr. Kemp’s were crazy.

Mr. Cagle enjoys a large money advantage over Mr. Kemp going into the final stretch of the primary campaign, but whether he can outgun Mr. Kemp remains to be seen. Earlier this year, Mr. Cagle supported a move that killed a tax break sought by Delta Air Lines after the airline ended a promotional discount for members of the National Rifle Association.

The N.R.A. rewarded Mr. Cagle with its endorsement, and on Saturday, it planned to send its president-elect, Oliver North, to three Cagle events in Georgia.

https://apnews.com/0b9004bc3828468d9dc636054140a047

TheGeorgia attorney general’s office will no longer represent the state’s top elections official in an elections integrity lawsuit filed three days before a crucial computer server was quietly wiped clean.

The lawsuit aims to force Georgia to retire its antiquated and heavily questioned touchscreen election technology, which does not provide an auditable paper trail.

The server in question was a statewide staging location for key election-related data. It made headlines in June after a security expert disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed for six months after he first reported it to election authorities. Personal data was exposed for Georgia’s 6.7 million voters, as were passwords used by county officials to access files.

The assistant state attorney general handling the case, Cristina Correia, notified the court and participating attorneys Wednesday that her office was withdrawing from the case, according to an email obtained by The Associated Press. Spokeswoman Katelyn McCreary offered no explanation and said she couldn’t comment “on pending matters.”

Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the main defendant, is running for governor in 2018 and his campaign said in a statement emailed to the AP that the attorney general’s office has a conflict of interest and cannot represent either Kemp’s office or the state elections board. Campaign spokesman Ryan Mahoney said in a text message that the conflict stems from “too many co defendants with potential differences in strategy, approach, etc.”

The secretary of state’s office had said in an earlier statement that the law firm of former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes [DEM]would represent Kemp and other state election officials. It made no mention of a conflict of interest.

The campaign statement quoted Mahoney as saying: “There is no scandal or vast conspiracy. This is a tasteless nothingburger cooked up by liberal activists who know their lawsuit is nothing short of stupid.”

Both Kemp andstate Attorney General Chris Carr are Republicans. Barnes is a Democrat.

The server’s data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system, Correia informed attorneys in the case in an Oct. 18 email. Twelve days earlier, she had informed the same group of attorneys that the data on the server was wiped on March 17, the same day it was returned to the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University by the FBI after a probe into the security incident. No one at the state attorney general’s office has explained Correia’s source for the apparently erroneous information on timing. The AP obtained both emails.

KSU email records obtained by the AP last week in an open records request say the server data was destroyed July 7.

The erased hard drives are central to the lawsuit because they could have revealed whether Georgia’s most recent elections were compromised by hackers. Russian interference in U.S. politics, including attempts to penetrate voting systems, has been an acute national preoccupation since last year.

It’s not clear who ordered the server’s data irretrievably erased.

Kemp has denied ordering the data destruction or knowing about it in advance.His office’s general counsel issued a two-page report Monday claiming Kennesaw State officials followed “standard IT practices” in wiping the server that “were not undertaken to delete evidence.” It said it first learned of the wiping of the main election server on Oct. 24, when the AP first asked about it.

In a public statement on the server wiping two days later, Kemp’s office decried the KSU’s wiping of the server as reckless, inexcusable and inept.

The report released Tuesday says “current indications are” that the FBI retains an image of the server that it made in March when it investigated the security hole. The FBI has not responded to AP inquiries on whether it still has that image or has performed a forensic examination to determine whether data on the server might have been altered by hackers.

Executive Director Marilyn Marks of the Coalition for Good Governance, a plaintiff in the case, called the attorney general’s office’s withdrawal from the legal defense shocking but not unexpected.

She accused Kemp of hiding the facts of the case — perhaps even from the state attorney general’s office.

“There have been multiple conflicting stories of how and when the evidence on the servers was destroyed.”

Frank Bajak on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fbajak

Submit a confidential tip: https://www.ap.org/tips/

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/trumps-vote-suppression-team-doing-gops-dirty-work

Anyone who favors expanding voting rights should be relieved by Wednesday’s demise of President Trump’s so-called Election Integrity Commission.But the panel’s right-wing agenda to rig the voting process to benefit the GOP will continue.

There’s plenty to cheer about when white nationalists like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice-chair, and voter suppressors like the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky were discredited by a panel run in a secretive, conspiratorial and clownish manner. But these Republicans are not giving up on their plan to create new barriers to eligible voters.

“Amid many challenges for the institutions of American democracy, this was a rousing win,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice. “No doubt, there is fallout to come… The commission has vanished, but its pernicious objectives persist. The White House has asked the Department of Homeland Security to take up the commission’s work—a dangerous and appalling idea. Earlier this morning, the president took to Twitter to renew calls for voting restrictions.”

Indeed, Kobach signaled his next move to Politico, which noted, “The Kansas official said he expects officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and political appointees overseeing that agency to take over the commission’s work and begin efforts to match state voter rolls to federal databases of noncitizens. He insisted he was not disappointed with the president’s decision.”

“It’s the right move,” Kobach said. “It’s a shifting in tactics from having the investigation be done by a federal commission to having it be done by a federal agency. The agency has a greater ability to move quickly to get the investigation done.”

The GOP Strategy Unmasked

Kobach’s is referring to a strategy employed by the most fervent partisan Republicans to position red-run states to keep new registrants from voting and do mass purges of infrequent but otherwise legal voters from their rolls. In short, it draws on intentionally sloppy data-mining to creates thousands of false positives that are then used to stymie voters. That porous data has been used in recent cycles in Georgia to delay approving new registrations and to accelerate mass purges of voter rolls. But it's not just Georgia.

In 2014, Florida’s top election official proposed using DHS’s problematic citizenship data to purge voter rolls. In response, county election supervisors rebelled and blocked it—because they still felt the sting of the 2000 election, when Secretary of State Katherine Harris used sloppy data-mining (seeking former felons who could not vote under that state's laws) to purge tens of thousands of eligible voters before that year's presidential election.

If Kobach has his way, the contours of that sordid history will repeat itself, including using a DHS database that was never designed to be an authoritative list of every U.S. citizen. But in the years since Harris’ Florida purge, the right-wing strategy has become clear.

Republicans like Kobach strategically target weak points in the voting process. They pinpoint areas in the process that are ambiguous, or where there’s no authoritative national data to counter their claims of purported illegal activity.

For example, there is no federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, which these right-wingers define as someone impersonating someone else at the polls to vote more than once, and has become the go-to justificatiom for red-run states to erect new barriers to voting century. Since there’s no single federal agency that tracks so-called voter fraud, it becomes a useful propaganda tool for Republicans because it's left to acacdemics and the media to debunk it, which these partisans routinely ignore.

The latest high-profile example of this narrative is Trump's thoroughly debunked claim that millions of Democrats illegally voted more than once to deprive him of 2016’s popular vote majority.But that lie, recited again by Trump’s press office when announcing the commission’s demise, resonates among supporters who want to believe all Democrats are crooks despite vast documentation by academics and the press that voter fraud barely exists. In the absence of an authoritative federal accounting, it becomes an easy pretext for red states to pass laws to, as they purport, police the process’ integrity. In reality, they thwart Democratic voters.

Not surprisingly, on Thursday, Kobach spewed that same line to—where else?—Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. “They [Democrats] have absolutely no interest in stopping voter fraud,” Kobach told Breitbart. “It’s truly extraordinary that one party in our system has made clear that they don’t care… Some people on the Left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.”

What's wrong with these figures? Beyond the fact that some of these numbers, like his Kansas statistics, have been debunked, what’s missing is the context or the larger number, the denominator if you will: that is, how many people voted legally in all the years cited? In other words, how pervasive is this problem? What is its real magnitude in the real world of voting?Kobach, pretending to be authoritative, then cited figures that also have been pedaled by the Heritage Foundation's von Spakovsky. “The voter fraud commission has revealed: 938 convictions for voter fraud since the year 2000,” he said. “Fewer than 1 in 100 cases ends in a conviction. In Kansas, alone, there are 127 known cases of non-citizen aliens registering to vote. In 21 states, there were 8,471 cases of double voting discovered.”

The answer is it is a trifle. That's because that well over half a billion people have voted in federal elections alone since 2000, which means the 938 figure is close to a once-in-a-million occurrence. Nonetheless, the absence of an authoritative federal agency tracking this activity and issuing authoritative reports that are respected by legislatures and the courts, perpetuates Kobach’s propaganda. Its absence continues to serve as a red-state pretext to overly police voting—as seen in Trump’s Thursday tweets.

Kobach Wants ICE to Vet New Voters?

That fabricated backdrop for imposing new restrictions on voting takes us to what’s new and potentially insidious about Kobach’s latest gambit. He wants the Department of Homeland Security to take responsibility for preventing “non-citizen aliens” from voting. Just like voter fraud, there is no authoritative federal database—even at DHS—listing every American citizen. Their database is designed to ensure welfare recipients are entitles to their benefits; but it is not a list of every U.S. citizen.

That deficiency creates an opening which right-wingers like Kobach, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner have sought to exploit—and have exploited—to game the process of voting to up the GOP’s chances of winning. Because DHS’s citizenship database is incomplete, it cannot confirm the citizenship of every new person registering to vote. That omission was exploited by Kemp to delay processing tens of thousands of new voter registrations in 2014. After that November, almost all of those registrations were approved; but not for the election those Georgians wanted to vote in.

When Detzner tried to force Florida county election offices to use DHS’s citizenship data to purge voter rolls—initially claiming, like Kobach, that there were hundreds of thousands of illegally registered voters—local officials balked and forced him to back down. Later, it was revealed that there were fewer than 100 questionable registrants among Florida's 10 million-plus registered voters.

Why would Republicans focus on proof of citizenship in order to vote? Because, as the Brennan Center reported in 2006 and updated in a report last summer, an estimated 7 percent of eligible voters don’t have such documentation, typically a birth certificate or passport. In other words, adding proof of citizenship to register will reduce participation in elections. (Think of it as a barrier at the starting line of the process, just as stricter state voter ID requirements is a barrier at the finish line.)

“A nationwide survey by the Brennan Center in November 2006 found that 7 percent of the citizen voting age population, or 13 million people, did not possess documents that would prove their citizenship,” the Center’s July 2017 reportsaid. “The rate is twice as high among citizens earning less than $25,000 per year. Women who changed their name upon getting married are especially likely to lack the relevant documents: A third of voting-age women don’t have proof of citizenship that reﬂects their current name.”

In other words, making proof of citizenship a new requirement before getting a ballot will mostly hurt likely Democrats.

Bad Data as a Partisan Tool

Republicans also know that the use of incomplete citizenship data can be used to stymie voters on Election Day. That's because it is a tool to do pre-emptive voter roll purges, in which inactive voters, especially in blue epicenters, can be disproportionately purged or removed from voting in the next election without reregistering.

That’s not a paranoid scenario. The Supreme Court will later this month hear a case over that very issue from Ohio, where GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted took advantage of two contradictory sentences in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to purge tens of thousands of mostly Democratic voters from his state’s three biggest cities. Reuters' reporters analyzed the purge and found it was mostly aimed at Democrats. Here again, the GOP saw and seized on a legal ambiguity and used data to tilt the process.

The reason Kobach and Trump’s commission was so bent on adding a new proof of citizenship standard is it benefits the GOP in many ways. First, as the Brennan Center noted, 7 percent of otherwise eligible voters don’t have the paper documentation.(Today people sign their name on registration forms as an oath under penalty of perjury; these Republicans say that's not good enough.) Beyond that, knowingly turning to sloppy data-mining to additionally delay new registrants further helps the GOP by thwarting grassroots registration drives. And using bad data to imprecisely target infrequent voters for selective purges also helps them.

The Voting Wars Continue

It’s a good thing that media scrutiny and public criticism of Trump’s election commission shut down that sham panel. But it was only one means to an end that is still in the GOP’s sights. Indeed, just this week it was revealed thst the Justice Department asked the U.S. Census to include a question on citizenship, citing a need to use that information to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.

Kobach and his ilk will do anything to subvert the process of voting for Democrats and non-whites. They’ve burrowed into the nooks and crannies of the law and process to exploit ambiguities and contradictions. Just watch what they will try to do in the months ahead—not just with baseless voter fraud accusation, but with screening for citizenship. As they wrap themselves in the flag, look at their data-mining. They know it’s shoddy and going to yield huge numbers of false positives, and that’s just what they want.

Steven Rosenfeld

https://www.alternet.org/activism/georgia-6th-house-district-special-election-case-gets-weirder-state-election-officials

fallout following a lawsuit filed in Georgia after its U.S. House Special Election last June get curiouser and curiouser, as we learned this week that the state attorney general's office has now quit its defense of the Secretary of State and the state's other top election official defendants in the case.

We've been covering this mess for months now (years, really), but particularly since the lawsuit [PDF] was filed in July, after the somewhat surprising results from June's U.S. House Special Election in Georgia's 6th Congressional District, where GA's former Republican Sec. of State Karen Handel reportedly defeated Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff, but only on the state's 100% unverifiable Diebold touch-screen voting systems. (He defeated her nearly 2 to 1 on the only verifiable ballots in the race, the mail-in paper votes. Everything else regarding the results is unverifiable speculation.)

Late last week, we learned via Frank Bajak at the Associated Press, that technicians at Kennesaw State University's Center for Elections, which has been contracted to program all of Georgia's computer voting and tabulation systems systems for some 15 years, "wiped clean" the election server that was used to program the elections, ballots and tabulators, just days after the suit was filed in July. Its two backup servers were also subsequently wiped and "degaussed three times" in August, the day after the suit was moved from state to federal court.

GA's chief election official, Republican Sec. of State Brian Kemp, who is running for governor in 2018, claims he knew nothing of the server deletions until AP's report last week. Previously, a huge fan of the Center for Elections at Kennesaw, Kemp cited the "gross incompetence" and "undeniable ineptitude" of the folks at KSU for whatever happened. Nobody has yet to take credit, however, for giving the instructions to delete the servers which held critical evidence that plaintiffs had hoped to have forensically investigated as part of the lawsuit. And then yesterday, in another flip-flop, Kemp called the entire matter "#fakenews."

All of that is disturbing on its own, but even more so in light of revelations earlier this year that the election server in question—which stored personal data for all of GA's 6.7 million voters and the electronic ballot programming and administrative passwords for the state's voting and tabulation systems—was left completely accessible online, no password necessary, for at least six months. Kennesaw was notified about the vulnerability by a data security researcher in August of 2016 (months before last year's Presidential election), but they failed to secure the server until after Politico's Kim Zetter revealed the vulnerability just prior to the GA-06 U.S. House race this year. (Samantha Bee's "Full Frontal" covered much of the story up to this point on her show last night.)

Then, on Wednesday evening, AP's Bajak offered another bombshell in reporting that the Republican state attorney general's office, which had been defending Kemp, Kennesaw and the state Elections Board in the matter, has now pulled out from defending them. The reasons offered by the state AG and Kemp's campaign for Governor (he's running in 2018) have conflicted with each other or with known evidence obtained during the multi-partisan lawsuit, which a Kemp campaign spokesperson describes to AP yesterday as "a tasteless nothingburger cooked up by liberal activists who know their lawsuit is nothing short of stupid."

One of those "liberal activist" plaintiffs, Republican Marilyn Mark, a longtime election integrity advocate and executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, confirms that nobody still knows who ordered the server deletion, nor why the state AG has dropped out of the case. "It's an enormous mystery, and the mysteries continue to increase every day," she says.

"I think that Brian Kemp is, and rightfully so, getting a black eye here," Marks tells me. "What he has done is shameful. There's no way to explain it. So I'm sure his defenders and campaign managers are doing everything they can to go on the offensive and try to make other people look like they are to blame, and that their candidate is innocent. But I think when people step back and say, wait a minute, if they erased the servers—and they did it twice—they did it for some reason. And it wasn't because our lawsuit was stupid."

She goes on to explain the "number of conflicting stories that Brian Kemp's people are telling" about when and why the compromised servers were deleted and why the AG's office is no longer willing to defend the case. She also details whether any of the information plaintiffs had hoped to examine from the servers might still be available in what is believed to be a partial copy of the servers obtained by the FBI when they came in to examine the reported data breach that occurred earlier this year, when the servers were discovered to have been left vulnerable online.

Georgia voters head to the polls for municipal elections being held next Tuesday, which will also be overseen by Kemp, programmed by Kennesaw, and run on the same wildly hackable, 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting and tabulation systems that lead to this entire mess in the first place.

She recently wrote [PDF] to Kemp and other election officials to ask them to make paper ballots available to voters since, as she tells me today, if the system was contaminated during the months it had been left vulnerable on the Internet, "They wouldn't have had time, even within the last year, to have cleaned up everything. Because, as you know, that malware can travel down to the memory cards, the voting machines, the optical scanners, and the jump servers down in the counties. Things could have traveled there in the last six months, year, two years—there's been no effort to try to disinfect all of the various components. I mean, there are 27,000 of these touch-screen voting machines in Georgia. There's no way that they should be in use when we know that this system was subject to a high degree of risk."

Brad Friedman is the publisher of the Brad Blog. He has appeared in the documentaries, Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections and Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/georgia-election-server-wiped

computer server that was used to store key elections data in the state of Georgia was completely wiped earlier this year after voting rights advocates filed a suit against Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

The *Associated Press* reports that the server’s data was destroyed this past July by unnamed technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which is responsible for running Georgia’s entire elections system. What’s more, two backup servers were also wiped completely clean in August, which was right around the time when a lawsuit against Kemp moved to federal court.

The lawsuit, which the AP says was filed shortly before the data server was wiped, was filed to end the state’s current voting infrastructure, which the plaintiffs claim is far too vulnerable to fraud and tampering. Among other things, the lawsuit notes that the state’s 27,000 AccuVote touchscreen voting machines do not offer paper receipts and are vulnerable to hacking.

“The server data could have revealed whether Georgia’s most recent elections were compromised by malicious hackers,” the AP notes. “The plaintiffs contend that the results of both last November’s election and a special June 20 congressional runoff— won by Kemp’s predecessor, Karen Handel — cannot be trusted.”

Kemp’s office claims that it had nothing to do with the center’s decision to wipe the server, despite the fact that center answers directly to Kemp. However, at this point it is not clear who ordered both the primary server and the backup servers wiped clean of data.

But Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech computer scientist, tells the AP that this should raise suspicions of some kind of foul play going on behind the scenes.

“People who have nothing to hide don’t behave this way,” he said.

wikifluff

Brian P. Kemp (born November 2, 1963) is the 27th and current Secretary of State of the U.S. State of Georgia. Kemp succeeded Karen Handel on January 8, 2010, when she stepped down to run in the 2010 Georgia gubernatorial election.

Kemp previously had served as a Georgia State Senator from 2002 to 2006 after defeating the Democratic incumbent. Kemp won the 2010 election for a full term as Georgia Secretary of State with 56.4% to 39.4% for his Democratic opponent, Georganna Sinkfield.^[1] In 2014, Kemp was re-elected.

On March 31, 2017, Kemp announced his candidacy in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election.

[hide]

Personal life:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Brian Kemp is a lifelong resident of Athens who is married and has 3 children. He attended Clarke Central High School and the University of Georgia, where he obtained a bachelor of science degree in agriculture. He along with his family are also active members of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Athens.^[2]

Business:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Brian Kemp is an active small business owner today with companies involved in agribusiness, financial services, and real estate management and investment.

Georgia election server:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

On July 3, 2017 the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance (CGG) alongside six Georgia voters filed suit against Brian Kemp on allegations that he and members of the Georgia State Elections Board allowed uncertified and compromised election systems to be used in the 2016 General Election and the June 20, 2017 Special Runoff.^[3] The lawsuit claims that Kemp, in his capacity as Secretary of State, rebuffed multiple requests by Georgian electors mandating him under GA Code § 21-2-379.2 to reexamine Georgia’s outdated electronic voting systems, and if need be, decertify those machines that could “no longer be safely or accurately used by electors at primaries or elections [...] because of any problem concerning its ability to accurately record or tabulate".^[4] Despite direct warnings that elements of the state voting system was vulnerable to exploitation, CGG claims that Kemp nonetheless allowed the compromised voting machines to be used in state elections going forward, ignoring a pending request for reexamination ahead of the 2017 Runoff.

Concerns about Georgia’s election integrity was brought to light in August 2016, when security researcher Logan Lamb discovered a vulnerability in the Kennesaw State University Center for Election Systems public website.^[5] For the past 15 years, Georgia’s voting infrastructure had been overseen and maintained by KSU’s Center for Elections Systems which deployed Direct Electronic Recording (DRE), antiquated touchscreen machines with known security exploits and unverifiable voting logs during elections.^[6] According to Lamb, KSU’s Center for Elections Systems had “misconfigured” its servers giving possible attackers access to the center’s root directories without logging in. Using an automated script, Lamb was able to download 15 GBs of data containing sensitive voter information. The latter included the "database of registration records for Georgia’s 6.7 million voters, multiple documents with instructions and passwords for election workers to sign in to on Election Day, software files for the state’s ExpressPoll pollbook" (a voter verification system) and access to the State’s Global Election Management Systems (GEMS) used to “prepare paper and electronic ballots, tabulate votes and produce summaries of vote totals”.^[5] The scope of the vulnerability might have allowed attackers to possibly plant malware, install backdoors into election offices, alter software files distributed to voting centers, rig votes, or delete and alter voting records.^[5] When Lamb notified Merle King, Executive director of CES, King reportedly threatened him, stating that if he talked, “the people downtown, the politicians … would crush” Lamb.^[3] The security holes were left unpatched for seven months. On March 2017, security researcher Chris Grayson, discovered yet another vulnerability on CES’s site that granted him access to the same files as Lamb.^[5] Word of the breaches reached the offices of Secretary Kemp, the Governor, and the FBI who set off internal and third party investigations. An investigation by KSU's UITS revealed that the Center for Elections Systems had been operating its networks outside the scope of both the University and the Secretary of State’s office for years, hosted data on unsecured servers, and utilized unpatched versions of Drupal vulnerable to exploitation.^[7]

Prior to the 2016 general elections, the Department of Homeland Security had offered to assess Georgia’s voting systems for vulnerabilities.^[8] Kemp declined the offer suggesting that the Federal Government was “federalizing elections under the guise of security”.^[9] Georgia was one of seven states to outright decline. In the wake of a 2017 DNI assessment on Russian meddling, some states such as Virginia opted to decertify DREs for elections, citing concern of “unauthorized access to the machines” and the inability for voters to verify their votes given the system’s lack of a voter-verified paper audit trail.^[10] Hitting back against allegations of inadequate oversight of Georgia’s election system, Kemp on July 2, 2017 submitted an op-ed to USA Today blaming the media for developing "false narratives about Russian hacking and potential vulnerabilities in the system” where “the prevailing plot line is that states like Georgia can't provide suitable security for elections".^[11] He concluded that states were doing enough to keep elections secure, and that "Anything to the contrary is fake news".^[11] On October 26, 2017, the Associated Press reported that technicians at KSU’s Center for Elections Systems had destroyed the server’s data using DBAN on July 7 2017, four days after the Coalition for Good Governance had filed its lawsuit against Kemp and Georgia election officials.^[12] It is unclear who ordered the destruction of the data despite KSU’s Center for Elections Systems answering to Kemp’s office. In the wake of the debacle, Kemp maintains that “Despite the undeniable ineptitude at KSU’s Center for Elections Systems […] Georgia’s elections are safe and our systems remain secure”.^[13] An exact data image of the server is said to be in the custody of the FBI when it opened its investigation in March 2017.^[12] On November 1, 2017, Georgia's assistant State Attorney General Cristina Correia notified the court that her office was withdrawing from the case and would no longer be representing the state's top election officials.^[14]

Electoral history:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Georgia State Senate 46th District Election, 2002	Georgia State Senate 46th District Election, 2002	Georgia State Senate 46th District Election, 2002	Georgia State Senate 46th District Election, 2002
Party	Candidate	Votes	%
Republican	Brian Kemp	17,504	50.7
Democratic	Doug Haines (inc.)	17,015	49.3

Georgia Secretary of State Republican Primary Election, 2010	Georgia Secretary of State Republican Primary Election, 2010	Georgia Secretary of State Republican Primary Election, 2010	Georgia Secretary of State Republican Primary Election, 2010
Party	Candidate	Votes	%
Republican	Brian Kemp	361,304	59.2
Republican	Doug MacGinnitie	248,911	40.8

Georgia Secretary of State Election, 2010	Georgia Secretary of State Election, 2010	Georgia Secretary of State Election, 2010	Georgia Secretary of State Election, 2010
Party	Candidate	Votes	%
Republican	Brian Kemp	1,440,188	56.4
Democratic	Georganna Sinkfield	1,006,411	39.4
Libertarian	David Chastain	106,123	4.2

Georgia Secretary of State Election, 2014	Georgia Secretary of State Election, 2014	Georgia Secretary of State Election, 2014	Georgia Secretary of State Election, 2014
Party	Candidate	Votes	%
Republican	Brian Kemp (inc.)	1,452,554	57.47
Democratic	Doreen Carter	1,075,101	42.53

References:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

External links:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Political offices	Political offices	Political offices
Preceded by Karen Handel	Secretary of State of Georgia 2010–present	Incumbent

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Preceded by

Karen Handel

Secretary of State of Georgia

2010–present

Incumbent

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Current statewide political officials of Georgia

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Secretaries of State in the United States

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Brian Kemp - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kemp

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:{Jump to :(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:**Georgia** election server - On July 3, 2017 the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance (CGG) alongside six Georgia voters filed suit against Brian Kemp on allegations that he and members of theGeorgia State Elections Board allowed uncertified and compromised election systems to be used in the 2016 ...

office of brian p kemp - Georgia Secretary of State

sos.ga.gov/index.php/general/office_of_brian_p_kemp

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{Georgia:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Secretary of State :{Brian Kemp:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: has served as Secretary of State since 2010. The Secretary of State is responsible for the administration of secure, accessible, and fair elections; registration of corporations; regulation of charities and securities; and oversight of professional license holders. Secretary Kemp has ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Brian Kemp for Governor.

www.kempforgovernor.com/

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{Brian Kemp:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is a conservative small businessman with a proven record of fighting – and winning – for:{Georgia:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Georgia election server reportedly wiped in wake of lawsuit - Engadget

https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/26/georgia-election-server-wiped-lawsuit/

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Oct 26, 2017 - There's something going on in :{Georgia:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. First, the state rejected help from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to inspect its voting equipment for potential hacker inroads. Strangely, the man responsible for this and a massive private data leak, :{Georgia's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Secretary of State :{Brian Kemp:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, was placed on ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

The Biggest Story Nobody's Talking About: The Recall Of Brian Kemp ...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/.../the-most-important-story-nobodys-talking-about-t...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{The Biggest Story Nobody's Talking About: The Recall Of :{Brian Kemp:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. 11/09/2017 05:04 am ET Updated Nov 09, 2017. Photo via :{Brian Kemp:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Facebook page. A petition is circulating in :{Georgia:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: to hold a recall election for Secretary of State :{Brian Kemp:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. Hundreds of thousands of signatures must be collected by ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Group aims to recall Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp - CBS46 ...

www.cbs46.com/story/.../group-aims-to-recall-georgia-secretary-of-state-brian-kemp

Nov 14, 2017 - A grass-roots petition drive is hoping to recall Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, an effort which is the first of its kind in the state.