The biggest threat to elections in Georgia
Trump-supporting conspiracists and moderately-trained staff have access to voting machines in Spalding County. What about the rest of the state?
For many months, the question has been a simple one: What access does Ben Johnson, the QAnon-supporting, election-denying conspiracy theorist in charge of the Spalding County elections board, have to voting machines and election equipment there? The question has never been fully answered, not by Johnson or anyone else in Spalding County.
Yesterday I reported that Johnson was at the vanguard of efforts in Spalding County to hire a third party firm to illegally access election equipment and voting machines and copy data from them. The deal never went through, but in Coffee County, where the same company did access machines, the act is being called an illegal data breach. This bit of news is just the latest development to come out of my 10-month long investigation into Spalding County, which has produced the revelations that Johnson is a believer in conspiracy theories directly related to voting machines while simultaneously serving as chair of the election board and running a company that apparently does IT and software work on that very equipment, is a QAnon conspiracy theorist, is far from alone in being an election denier on an election board in Georgia, and, now, that he tried to hire a company to illegally copy data from those machines for unknown purposes.
Red flag, alarm bell, five-alarm fire, Paul Revere screaming from the fucking church steeple that the British are coming — I don’t know any other way to put it other than that elections are under direct threat right now from Trump-supporting election conspiracy theorists throughout Georgia and no one is doing much of anything about it. I’ve been saying this for months and it’s no less true today than it was last December when I first wrote about this assault on free and fair elections. Stacy Abrams and other Democrats like to talk about voter suppression through laws and rules that affect access to the polls. They should be more worried about the people like Johnson who have access to the votes themselves and have said they’re willing to do something about it.
Even if Johnson and his fellow true believers don’t directly mess with election equipment, they have the power to certify — or not — local election results. And if you don’t think that’s coming as soon as the Midterms and most definitely in 2024, you haven’t been paying attention.
So what access does Johnson have to election equipment in his county? Plenty, I’ve found in the course of my investigation. But the larger question now becomes: What access do his fellow Insurrectionists have to election equipment throughout Georgia?
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As many of you know every county in Georgia uses Dominion Voting Machines equipment to conduct its elections. Up until the end of 2020, warranty and maintenance work on those machines was required by state law to be performed by the company. This meant that Dominion had to work on its own machines any time they malfunctioned. But at the end of 2020, that agreement expired. Beginning in early 2021, counties could choose whether to extend the warranty and maintenance agreement with Dominion or go it alone. This means counties would maintain voting machines and election equipment themselves with a modicum of training from the Secretary of State. Who are the people performing such maintenance? Thanks to a Tuesday night meeting of the election board in Spalding County, we now have an idea.
At that meeting, a citizen expressed her concerns that Johnson’s company, Liberty Technologies, performs all manner of technical work for county computer systems — including its election equipment. As if serving as chair of a county board while running a company that profits from the county weren’t enough of a conflict of interest, Johnson is a well-documented conspiracy nut. To allay the citizen’s concerns, Johnson asked election supervisor Kim Slaughter to describe how the county’s election equipment is serviced and maintained.
That’s when Slaughter informed the board that it’s mostly her who deals with updates and other technical maintenance of the equipment. Now, I’m sure Slaughter’s training from the Secretary of State was robust, but this is a woman who routinely commits errors on election board legal documents, and struggles to coordinate with county IT staff to update meeting minutes on the county’s website. Slaughter has the vibe of an overworked librarian just trying to keep her head above water serving as the county’s chief election official, a job for which she may not have been fully qualified for in the first place, according to a Democrat election board member.
Now we know that Slaughter is the primary technician for the county’s election management system, which includes servers, poll pads, ballot marking devices, and other highly technical equipment. But is she really acting alone? Or, as is more likely the case, is she working on this election equipment with technical assistance from Johnson and his company?
Regardless, are election supervisors who’ve taken a crash course in highly technical election equipment or local IT firms really who we want maintaining our election equipment?
I don’t know how many other Kim Slaughters there are throughout Georgia, because I haven’t seen any reporting on counties that canceled their contracts with Dominion in favor of doing it themselves. But I’m betting there are quite a few like Spalding, which canceled the contract to save money. Instead of paying a Dominion technician $4,500 to deal with election equipment when it breaks or malfunctions, Spalding County wants its residents to feel secure knowing that Kim Slaughter is now handling the issue, and saving the county that $4,500.
You may not care about Spalding County, or you may think a small place like that doesn’t matter in the bigger scheme of things, but it does. If election equipment is being accessed by people like Slaughter and Johnson there, then you can bet it’s being accessed by the same caliber of people — or worse — elsewhere. Is the Secretary of State looking into this? The State Election Board? Local reporters? I don’t know, but what I do know is that when I talk to people across this state about what I’ve found in Spalding County, it’s usually me telling them something they didn’t know. It feels like the checks have failed, there’s no guard at the gate, and anything goes.
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The screenshot at the top of this post is from Johnson’s personal Facebook page. Like his hero Trump, he likes to threaten to sue and/or ruin people who ask simple questions about what he does as a government official. Also like Trump he’s a coward who’s not going to do a damn thing. (He’s threatened to sue me at least twice.) Thanks to all who read this newsletter, and welcome to the new readers who are here as a result of my story on Spalding County from yesterday. Glad to have you. Here’s an introduction to myself and this newsletter, Where Do We Go From Here, that I wrote in 2020 after many learned of my work through my coverage of George Floyd. Hope you stick around. We get into some weird shit here.