If you click through and actually read the other article it was updated 12 hours after it was original published to reflect that they were wiped AFTER they were turned over to the FBI to image the drives and preform analysis and that all the data would be made available in the lawsuit. Kinda like this article had to be updated to reflect that this click-bait headline is not really true ether. But don't worry in a couple of months in a future post they will again refer to that one time when Georgia had 243 percent turnout with out mentioning it's not really true.

Considering its government I'd normally automatically point to incompetence as the likely culprit 90% of the time, as it seems our common standards has decreased to this point as the new "normal" for public service. But there have been enough intentional data erasures by politicians/agencies in the last decade where I'm no longer convinced this is always the case.

They let the FBI image the servers in question before wiping them, which is really all that's necessary for them to investigate the hack.

It doesn't look good, but isn't proof of guilt. Did they say why they did it? I'm wondering if they're required to reformat the machines X days after an election result has been certified. I can't think of other legitimate reasons though.

It's not good.

"On July 3, Marks' organization and state voters filed their lawsuit, and on July 7, technicians at KSU wiped the server. When the case later moved to federal court in August, technicians wiped at least one additional server one day after a federal judge was assigned to the case."

https://fcw.com/articles/2017/12/08/wray-fbi-georgia-electio...

In my mind, if you are working in a official government role and you knowingly destroy evidence of a potential crime, you are already guilty. It doesn't matter if there was actually a crime that was concealed by doing that, the public has a right to transparency and to have a thorough investigation conducted to determine if there was a crime, and you wrongfully deprived them of that.

It doesn't matter if there is some law requiring you to destroy that evidence, because there are also laws requiring that you not destroy evidence of crimes.

It's not that formalized or that well thought out of a process overall. How voting is conducted is fairly federated, and CES had a huge unsecured dump of voting data from all over the state open to anyone who knew about it. The guy at the Black Hat conference covered it pretty completely, I think.

Just assume that the people involved in the voting process don't understand data management and storage practices or things like access control or asset value and have no budget to train or retain, and it makes sense. The upload interface was depracated, unpatched Drupal of that's any indication of their IT effort. Set it and forget it.

From what I was told, the FBI already had copies of the data, and I'm sure a college who gave the state some space and services to run things didn't want to be responsible any more than a datacenter would want to be for hoating a MEGA storage node after the Dotcom raid. Get the hot potato out of there, let the law enforcement handle it.

This means no data was lost or rendered unavailable, just that it would be the FBI's responsibility to furnish that evidence in event of any further lawsuits.