How did Georgia Republicans get access to sensitive election information?

Encryption keys and passwords... Hacking attempts and flipped votes... Republicans have things they shouldn't have.

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It is the question beguiling many election observers and officials in Georgia at the moment: how did Republicans get their hands on encryption keys for election systems in five counties? 

The revelation came in a lawsuit filed last month by the DeKalb County GOP. The lawsuit was filed against Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger and alleges that Georgia’s election equipment and voting machines, run by Dominion Voting, are vulnerable to hacking. Republicans in DeKalb claim that hackers could quite literally “flip” votes after gaining access to election equipment via the encryption keys that have been made public since 2021. (Vote-flipping has been an obsession of the election denial movement for years and one of the lawyers behind the DeKalb suit — Harry MacDougald — has been on the front lines of that conspiracy, as I reported in February of last year.) 

Raffensberger says it’s not possible to flip votes outside of controlled settings where election equipment has been accessed as part of several court cases, but there remains a perhaps more burning question: how did Republicans obtain these encryption keys in the first place? There are a number of possibilities, but the most likely are as follows: 

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