The Washington Post reports:

A week after the 2020 election, as Donald Trump raged over what he claimed was rampant fraud, officials in a rural county in southern Georgia received a disturbing report from the employee who ran their elections.

New voting machines in use across the state could “very easily” be manipulated to flip votes from one candidate to another, she claimed at a meeting of the county elections board, and ballots could be scanned and counted more than once. She stressed that she had correctly tallied the results in their county, where Trump won in a landslide. But she said not everyone in positions like hers could be trusted to do the same.

“Yes there are several check points for the honest person, but the honest person is not in every county,” Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Hampton told the board, according to minutes of the Nov. 10 meeting. One board member declared that the new equipment, made by Dominion Voting Systems, “SICKENS HIM.”

Alerted by Hampton, Trump’s team quickly took interest. “I would like to obtain as much information as possible,” a campaign staffer emailed Hampton that same day.

The elections board meeting — a gathering of eight people in an unremarkable building 200 miles from Atlanta — set off an extraordinary sequence of events that plunged the GOP enclave into the middle of a multistate effort by prominent Trump allies to gain access to voting machines in search of purported evidence that the election was rigged.

In two instances, courts or state lawmakers granted Trump supporters access to the machines, which are considered by the federal government to be “critical infrastructure” vital to national security and are usually closely guarded. But in at least seven other counties in four states, including Coffee, local officials acting without a court order or subpoena allegedly gave outsiders access to the machines or their data, a Washington Post examination found. [Continue reading…]