The voting systems breach in a rural Georgia county that resulted in the indictments of local officials alongside Donald Trump continues to tear that community apart.
Roughly 70 Coffee County residents gathered Saturday for a town hall meeting about the January 2021 breach, which has embarrassed and worried locals, and attendees wanted to know if their personal information was “floating around in cyberspace," reported The Guardian.
“People think, ‘He’s been indicted in Atlanta, so it’s over,’” said 80-year-old resident Jim Hudson. “[But] how do we regroup? How do we become a county not referred to as ‘Crooked Coffee’?”
Multiple individuals working on behalf of the former president allegedly went inside the county elections office and copied software and other data from the voting systems, and that digital information has passed through an unknown number of hands, putting future elections at risk in Coffee County and any other county that uses Dominion Voting Systems or partner companies.
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“I found out what happened on TV, [and]I was shocked to find out," said Larry Nesmith, of Douglas. "I feel our board of elections tried to cover [it] up. There’s no way they didn’t know.”
Nesmith, a longtime Democratic activist in the area, said he would have been at the board of elections on Jan. 7, 2021, but he said former elections director Misty Hampton -- who was indicted alongside Trump and 18 others -- told him not to come that day.
“Those responsible need to be held accountable,” Nesmith said. “These are people I know. Those who haven’t been indicted need to be. Bring them to justice. Don’t let them walk away.”
Coffee County is 68 percent white, but most of the attendees at the town hall were Black, and they expressed frustration that state and local investigators have seemingly been unwilling to unravel the scheme, and they wondered when Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger learned of the breach.
“You can’t wait on the state,” said Marilyn Marks, the town hall’s main speaker. “It’s up to local people to demand accountability.”
The attendees noted that Olivia Coley-Pearson, the first Black woman elected as a Douglas city commissioner, was charged with multiple felony charges for helping disabled and illiterate voters access the polls, although she was never found guilty, but she faces years of legal battles against the state.
“If this was Olivia Coley-Pearson [who breached the elections system], she’d be in jail already," Hudson said.