The good news out of Georgia concerning vote suppression in Gwinnett County is that the ACLU did, in fact, suggest that letting non-experts judge the validity of signatures was unconstitutional, and the judge agreed:
The plaintiffs, including the ACLU, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Coalition for Good Governance, argued that allowing nonexpert election officials to judge the validity of signatures without giving voters the chance to contest the decisions amounted to unconstitutional voter suppression.
U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May agreed, and she ordered Secretary of State Brian Kemp to instruct all local election officials to stop rejecting absentee ballots over the mismatched signatures. Instead, such ballots will be marked “provisional,” and the voter will be given the right to appeal the decision or confirm his or her identity. Kemp and the Gwinnett County election board were named as defendants in the suit. [WaPo]
And Gwinnett County is the second largest in the State.
This is, you’ll remember, the same state where current Secretary of State Brian Kemp is also GOP candidate for Governor Brian Kemp, meaning he has a conflict of interest, which he refuses to acknowledge. I thought this final comment in the WaPo story was interestingly naive:
The “exact match” law has been blamed for the suspension of more than 53,000 registration applications in Georgia this year.
Kemp has also been accused of purging hundreds of thousands of active voters from the state’s rolls.
He has argued that his office has properly maintained the state’s voting rolls and that the “exact match” law is an appropriate safeguard against voter fraud.
Now, we’re all familiar with computer breaches. Typically, these are spun as simply someone gaining access to some enormous amount of data of a sensitive nature, presumably to use for identity theft or other nefarious purposes.
But that’s just one form of computer breach. Imagine someone gaining the ability to alter that data. Now imagine someone gaining access to the voter rolls, and, say, altering the data so that the middle name or middle initial of some subset is changed.
And that subset is defined to be mostly Republican voters. Or Democratic. Or black. Keep that imagination going folks, because right now we’re talking about weaponizing our computer systems, and, like most weapons, they can be equally efficient without regard to the identity of the target.
Speaking as a software engineer: once a malicious hacker[1] gains enough access to alter data, this is not difficult. In fact, depending on the security configuration and how easy it is to connect to other databases, this can even be trivial for any database programmer who’s gotten beyond the stage that I affectionately call “half-baked.”
And if that occurs in conjunction with this “exact match” law, well, I understand how anyone concerned about voter fraud might think this law is a good thing, but I dearly hope that I have demonstrated why such a law, assuming its little name is properly descriptive, is actually a big bloody disaster just waiting to happen.
That law probably should be repealed as soon as possible, and Republicans, if they’re smart, will lead the way, because they are as likely to become victims as anyone.
And this lets me move on to a reader comment:
The not wanting an ID to vote should be a no issue thing. How would you like if somebody hijacked your name and voted for a liberal.
Here’s the thing: how much of a problem has voter fraud been over the years? I honestly cannot think of voter fraud being an issue during my lifetime, with two exceptions.
First, our “sore winner” Trump, who has spat out accusations of fraud with no evidence, and then appointed a commission to investigate, who got little cooperation and, again, found no evidence for widespread fraud.
Second, I have heard rumors that there was voter fraud in Chicago during the JFK / Nixon contest of 1960 (actually, not my lifetime, but I’ll roll with it). However, despite the tightness of the race, Nixon refused to call for a recount:
There were charges of vote fraud in Texas and Illinois, both states won by Kennedy; Nixon refused to consider contesting the election, feeling a lengthy controversy would diminish the United States in the eyes of the world, and the uncertainty would hurt U.S. interests. [Wikipedia]
Otherwise, not much. Now, it sounds like a fine thing to tighten up voting processes, yet it appears that, historically, we’ve done just fine. And then let’s add in my analysis of this “exact match” law – the Law of Unintended Consequences is alive and on the march, and it should teach us to move slowly and with deliberation before disturbing processes that work. I’d hate to hear that Republican voters were disenfranchised in a close race just as much as I would black voters, Latino voters, or any other “minority”, just because we thought we were making a process more secure or efficient – when it already works. Not only is it a miscarriage of justice, but the follow-on bitterness damages our nation.
Or, as should be tattooed on the inner eyelids of every engineer, Don’t fix what isn’t broken.
1 Naturally, a government employee with access to the voter rolls could also inflict extensive damage, or corruption as we call it in the trade. The real question concerning both hacker and employee is whether their technical proficiency is such that they can even cover their tracks so that the corruption is only detected piecemeal.
