Law, Power, and Justice

The charges include allegations about a largely overlooked incident in Coffee County, Georgia.
— Read on www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/fani-williss-indictment-of-donald-trump-and-a-voting-system-breach

several of the Defendants corruptly conspired” and “stole data, including ballot images, voting equipment software and personal voter information” in Coffee County, a rural outpost in the southeastern corner of the state, two hundred miles from Atlanta. Since all of Georgia uses the same Dominion voting machines and software, this theft provided access to the entire election system in the state. According to the indictment, the software was then shared with people around the country, some of whom are cited by Willis as unindicted co-conspirators. In March, according to the Los Angeles Times, during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, a small group of people, and many others online, watched a presentation using the stolen software, suggesting that it is still circulatingamong those who aim to assist Trump in his current benighted quest to recapture the Presidency.

Once copies of the Dominion Voting Systems software were made, they were uploaded to a server at SullivanStrickler, and then downloaded by others.

The alleged conspiracy came to light as a result of a confluence of a years-long lawsuit challenging the security of Georgia’s election systems, the determination of a private citizen named Marilyn Marks, and a phone call that Hall—who said that he had chartered a plane from Atlanta which took him and the SullivanStrickler employees to Coffee County—made to Marks. In 2017, Marks, who runs a small nonprofit called the Coalition for Good Governance, sued the State of Georgia and its then secretary of state, Brian Kemp, for its reliance on touch-screen voting machines. Because D.R.E. machines, as they are known, produce no paper record of cast ballots, and have been shown to be easily hacked, Marks was pushing for the state to move to hand-marked paper ballots

But what happened in Coffee County was not an isolated incident

two Republican operatives in Michigan, Matthew DePerno and Daire Rendon, were arraigned on crimes that could be charged as felonies for breaching election systems.

DePerno, who was charged with conspiracy to gain access to a computer or a computer system, among other offenses, ran unsuccessfully for Michigan attorney general last year. (He was endorsed by Trump and supported by Mike Lindell, the C.E.O. of MyPillow.) Among the charges against Rendon, a former state representative, is conspiracy to illegally obtain a voting machine. According to the Times, “the charges stemmed from a bizarre plot hatched by a group of conservative activists in early 2021 to pick apart voting machines in at least three Michigan counties, in some cases taking them to hotels and Airbnb rentals as they hunted for evidence of election fraud.” Doug Logan and Jeffrey Lenberg allegedly were also involved in the Michigan breach. (Lenberg and Logan could not be reached for comment.)

A coördinated effort to copy and disseminate voting-machine software, orchestrated by lawyers working for Trump and facilitated by election officials loyal to him, as alleged in the Georgia indictment, is an unimaginable violation.