Who Will Watch the Election Watcher in the Georgia Governor’s Race?

When not in use, each of Georgia’s 27,000 ballot-casting machines collapses to the size of a suitcase. For elections they unfold, storklike, onto spindly legs, with wings to shield their electronic screens. There’s a flaw in their engineering, though. The digital memory cards that record votes produce no independent paper trail that can be audited. A citizen can’t verify that the equipment has accurately recorded her vote.

Computer scientists have been demonstrating disastrous security issues in these kinds of machines for more than a decade—and Georgia election officials have been aware of the risks since at least 2008. In 2016 it became clear that the threats were neither imaginary nor theoretical and that Georgia’s system was among the most exposed and vulnerable in the country. Meanwhile, the man charged with overseeing the state’s elections for the past eight years has scoffed at cybersecurity concerns.