Surveillance footage shows Georgia GOP official giving access to breached voting machines

published 7 September 2022

Surveillance video from the election office in rural Coffee County, Georgia, released Tuesday shows a top local Republican Party official escorting a series of conservative activists and election skeptics into the office in January 2021, along with computer experts who copied huge amounts of voting machine data.

"The recording is the latest evidence of an effort by supporters of former President Donald Trump to take sensitive data from voting equipment manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems in several states," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. The footage "offers a glimpse of the lengths Trump's allies went in service of his fraudulent election claims," The Associated Press adds, and "it further shows how access allegedly was facilitated by local officials entrusted with protecting the security of elections while raising concerns about sensitive voting technology being released into the public domain."

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Also seen in the footage are former Coffee County elections director Misty Hampton, who resigned in February 2021; election board member Eric Chaney, who resigned last month right before a deposition in which he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, Atlanta-area bail bondsman and pro-Trump election skeptic Scott Hall; Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, best known for overseeing a controversial partisan recount in Maricopa County, Arizona; and computer security consultant Jeffrey Lenberg, under scrutiny for similar voting machine incidents in New Mexico and Michigan.

The footage was released as part of a years-old lawsuit alleging Georgia's voting machines are not secure. "It looks to be a coordinated effort at the highest levels of the Trump campaign," David Cross, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told the Journal-Constitution. "What we see here is what looks to be an interstate effort to get access to the Dominion voting equipment and in particular the underlying software." State election officials say the machines are secure, with layers of protections from manipulation.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.