Georgia to replace voting machines in Coffee County after alleged security breach

Some election-security experts have voiced concerns that the copying of the Coffee County software — used statewide in Georgia — risks exposing the entire state to hackers, who could use the copied software as a road map to find and exploit vulnerabilities. Raffensperger’s office has said that security protocols would make it virtually impossible for votes to be manipulated without detection.

The move comes after Raffensperger’s office spent months voicing skepticism that such a security breach ever occurred in Coffee County. “There’s no evidence of any of that. It didn’t happen,” Gabe Sterling, Raffensperger’s chief operations officer, said at a public event in April.

Since then, the fact that outsiders accessed county voting machines — and copied sensitive software and data — has been confirmed by sworn depositions, video surveillance footage from inside and outside of the county elections office and other documents turned over to plaintiffs in long-running civil litigation over election security in Georgia. The plaintiffs argue that the state should replace touch-screen voting machines with hand-marked paper ballots. Raffensperger and other Georgia officials are defendants in that case. They deny that the voting system is insecure.

The announcement said that Coffee County would receive new “ballot-marking devices,” the touch-screen voting machines that voters use to make their selections; printers for paper ballots with voters’…