ATLANTA — You've heard the talk for months now: allegations that Tuesday's election could somehow be rigged or hacked.
Georgia's officials who oversee the voting system say that's almost impossible.
"I'm very confident. I'm as confident as I can be," said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp.
He knows some things will go wrong on Tuesday; they always do.
But he says vote rigging or voting systems being hacked are highly unlikely and, technologically, next to impossible.
"We have taken extreme measures in the agency to protect our systems," said Kemp.
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The critical part of Georgia's election system that is done online is the uploading of results Tuesday night, but those are just the unofficial results.
If those are intercepted or altered, the county workers would know that, and the actual memory cards are later transported, by law enforcement officers, in locked bags to the state headquarters to be confirmed before the results are considered to be official.
"The system is layered up with physical security, cybersecurity, procedural security and chain-of-custody requirements," said Merle King, Executive Director of Georgia's Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University.
Before the election, the voter databases are prepared by the state, and hand-delivered to each county on compact disc.
The voting system on Election Day uses air-gapped computers that have never been connected to the internet.
The memory cards are unique to each machine. The machine won't work without its card and the screen displays an error if any other programs are detected on the system.
"It is a closed loop system that's not connected to the Internet, so the whole hacking part of this never was a concern for me, when you talk about the vote count or our actual voting equipment," said Kemp.
Every machine is tested by voting each candidate in every race, to make sure they're recorded properly.
Those cards are locked into the machines with a key that's kept at the elections office.
The number of votes is also confirmed repeatedly throughout the day.
"The poll workers will count the number of oaths signed, the number of voters checked in at the electronic poll book and the poll counter on the number of ballots cast. And those have to agree," said King.
King says if someone did try to tamper with an election, it would almost certainly be detectable and, in that case, correctable.
"There are people watching the people, who are watching the people," he said.
As usual, the biggest concerns are human error and isolated cases of individual voter fraud.
"But you're not going to have that in a widespread way that it would disrupt, certainly, a state or national election," said Kemp.
In 2008, a Channel 2 Action News investigation caught a handful of Georgians who early voted in two states.
In 2010, we found nearly 250 Georgia voters were also listed in county records as non-U.S. citizens. Many had voted.
In 2012, Fulton County excluded more than 400 provisional ballots, even though they were cast by voters who were properly registered.
In that same election, one poll worker wrote her own name on seven provisional ballot envelopes. The county couldn't possibly check for valid registration, but counted those votes anyway.
"The scale is kind of unimaginable of what would have to be done to alter the outcome of an election undetected, and I think that's the critical thing," said King, "People should go to the polls with confidence that their vote is going to be captured accurately, counted correctly and reported completely."