https://www.thebulwark.com/how-team-trump-breached-the-election-system/
How Team Trump Breached the Election System
MAGA activists’ schemes to obtain voting equipment were more far-reaching, and more successful, than previously known.
by AMANDA CARPENTER
AUGUST 29, 2022 5:30 AM
“We scanned every freaking ballot,” Georgia businessman and MAGA activist Scott Hall said in a 2021 phone call. (A
recording of the call has been filed to the Fulton County court.) Hall recounted how he chartered a plane of data experts to examine machines in Coffee County, Georgia.
Trump won the county by 40 percent, but Trump supporters wanted to prove how the systems could be manipulated, not necessarily that the results in Trump-winning counties were false.
Hall went on, “I keep saying, guys, all of that effort, you know, the same people who went up to Michigan and did all that forensic stuff on the computers, and they sent their team down to Coffee County, Georgia, and they scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives, and scanned every single ballot. You know, absentee in-person, in-person, and absentee by mail, and have gotten no feedback.”
“They imaged the hard drives?” the woman who recorded the phone call, Marilyn Marks, asked incredulously.
“Yes,” Hall replied.
“How in the world did you get permission to do that?” Marks asked.
Hall explained: “We basically had the entire elections committee there, okay, and they said, ‘We give you permission, go for it.’ So they went there and imaged every hard drive of every piece of equipment, you know all of the poll pads, everything.”
The CEO of the data solutions company SullivanStrickler, Paul Maggio, backed up Hall’s account.
Maggio sent an email to Trump lawyer Sidney Powell on the morning of January 7, 2021 to notify her that his team was “on our way to Coffee County Georgia to collect what we can from the Election/ Voting machines and systems.” He later said things were “going well.” The
Washington Post reported Powell contracted with SullivanStrickler for as much as $26,000 per job.
Neither the attack on the U.S. Capitol nor Congress’s official certification of Joe Biden’s victory slowed them down.
According to the Washington Post, SullivanStrickler workers traveled not just to Georgia but also to Nevada and Michigan at the direction of Trump’s lawyers and later shared data with Trump allies, including a guest on Sean Hannity’s radio show.
As Hall explained, it wasn’t difficult for SullivanStrickler to obtain the data. In Georgia, former Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Hampton said she was happy to admit Hall and others into her office. She previously recorded a viral video that
purported to show flaws in Dominion Voting Systems machines and said she wanted help verifying “
that this election was not done true and correct.”
Hampton’s actions and remarks suggest she had utter disregard for the integrity of the election equipment. She provided unsupervised access to the system because, as she said, “I’m not a babysitter.”
“I don’t see why anything that is dealing with elections is not open to the public,” Hampton told the
Post. “Why would you want to hide anything?”
