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Don’t know about Abrams, but the Democrats had been complaining about Kemp allegedly rigging votes in Georgia for years before changing their tune about election challenges in 2020:

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https://jennycohn1.medium.com/georgia-6-and-the-voting-machine-vendors-87278fdb0cdf

Georgia 2002–2017: The Epicenter of America’s Corrupted Electronic Elections

By Jennifer Cohn
@jennycohn1
June 29, 2018
Updated August 20, 2018,

The special election in Georgia’s 6th district.
A
In 2017, Georgia politician Tom Price joined the Trump administration, leaving his House seat in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District vacant.

The vacancy represented one of the first realistic opportunities for Democrats to “flip” a House seat from red to blue in the aftermath of the 2016 election. The race was billed by the media as a “referendum on Trump” and a “bellwether” for 2018.

The national significance of the contest brought forth a flood of advertising and organization, making it the most expensive House race of all time.

The top two contenders were Republican Karen Handel (an anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, pro-gun “Christian”) and Democrat Jon Ossoff (who is pro-choice on abortion, pro-gay rights, and less gun happy than Handel).

But even before the first ballot was cast, election integrity advocates and IT experts were sounding the alarm about the integrity of the race. Georgia is one of just five states that still exclusively uses paperless voting machines. Paperless voting machines are an especially attractive target for hackers because there is nothing to compare against the electronic tally to confirm whether it was manipulated. Thus, the only way to know if a paperless machine has been hacked is to conduct a forensic audit, which courts have consistently refused to allow based on the purportedly proprietary nature of the vendors’ software.

Georgia bought its touchscreen machines from Diebold in May 2002.

Diebold had entered the voting machine business just a few months prior with its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a company founded by three criminals.

At the time, Georgia’s Secretary of State was Cathy Cox, who allowed Diebold to use her image on its promotional materials.

Cox’s former boss, Lewis Massey, undoubtedly profited from the decision, as he had been retained by Diebold to lobby for the Georgia contract.

Georgia’s election director at that time was a woman named Kathy Rogers, who played a major part in the decision.

Diebold had entered the voting machine business just a few months prior with its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a company founded by three criminals.

Global’s Senior VP was a convicted felon, Jeffrey Dean, who had served time for sophisticated crimes involving “computer tampering.” According to the Guardian, Dean was also the company’s senior programmer.

Global brought on Dean several months before the 2000 Bush v. Gore election. Soon after hiring Dean, Global hired convicted cocaine trafficker John Elder to oversee punch card printing in several states.

We all remember the punch card recount fiasco of the 2000 election.

A lesser known fiasco from the Bush v. Gore election involved a Global/Diebold machine that inexplicably “lost” 16,000 Gore votes in Volusia County, Florida. The Volusia error was caught only “because an alert poll monitor noticed Gore’s vote count going down through the evening, which of course is impossible.”

Dean and Elder’s criminal past and relationship to Global/Diebold were discovered not by the mainstream media, but rather by election integrity advocate and “Black Box Voting” author Beverly Harris.

Diebold told the AP that Dean left the company in 2002 (when Diebold acquired Global), and the AP took the company’s word at face value. But Harris obtained Dean’s court file, which included internal Diebold memos showing that Dean remained as a Diebold consultant. The mainstream media wasn’t interested.

The bill’s primary sponsor was Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio who used his position as chairman to defeat legislation that would have required voting machines to include a paper trail.

Ney would eventually go to prison for corruption involving his acceptance of bribes from Washington DC lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at least $275,000 to lobby the federal government on behalf of Diebold, the number one vendor of paperless voting machines. . .

During the same election, Brian Kemp — Georgia’s current Secretary of State — defeated Doug Haines, a liberal incumbent in a left-leaning state House seat that had been held by Democrats for more than four decades. Kemp won by only 486 votes, an exceedingly small vote margin that likely would have triggered a recount but for the paperless machines.

In 2003, “A former worker in the Diebold warehouse in Georgia” alleged that the company had patched Georgia’s voting machines after they were delivered to the counties and shortly before the … election in 2002.” This was corroborated by the New York Times after about 15,000 internal Diebold e-mail messages — some of which referred to the installation of software patches before the 2002 election — somehow made their way onto the internet.

Equally disturbing, in 2004, the DHS quietly released a Cyber Alert concerning an “undocumented backdoor account” to the Diebold Global Election Management System, which programs the electronic ballots for its touchscreen machines.

Georgia Secretary of State Cox was unconcerned. In 2005 or 2006, she doubled down on Diebold with a $15 million purchase of new electronic poll books, which (according to voters) would later fail in multiple locations.

Unlike Cox, the media and public had at this point begun to question the wisdom of continuing to use unverifiable voting machines. Here is a quote from a 2006 article in Savannah Now, a local Georgia publication:

At first, it was easy to brush aside complaints by small but noisy groups that e-voting invited vote-stealing.

But now people with gold-plated academic pedigrees agree.

Avi Rubin, professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, says devices like Diebold’s can be rigged — without detection.

“There are major flaws in the security design of the software,” said David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University in Southern California.

In June, The Brennan Center for Justice, a non- partisan New York think tank, said systems like Georgia’s “pose a real danger to the integrity of … state … elections.”

This was the year that a team of computer security researchers published a report finding that “touchscreen voting machines made by the notably litigious vendor Diebold were vulnerable to ‘extremely serious attacks.’ The researchers were so afraid of being sued by Diebold … that they broke with longstanding practice and didn’t tell the company about their findings before publishing.”

The same year, a Diebold whistleblower named Chris Hood spoke to RFK Jr. about the 2002 Georgia election. “Hood wondered why Diebold, the world’s third-largest seller of ATMs, had been awarded the [Georgia] contract. The company had barely completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the highest among nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was in.”. . .

The same year, a laboratory run by the Department of Energy showed how Diebold voting machines — used by a third of all voters nationwide (at the time), including Georgia — could be hacked via remote control.

By then, Georgia’s governor, Sonny Perdue, had appointed Brian Kemp to the office of Secretary of State, replacing Handel who had left office to pursue an unsuccessful bid for governor.

Kemp expressed no interest in replacing Georgia’s paperless machines, and the national media gave him little grief.

But that has begun to change courtesy of the Georgia 6th District special election in 2017. On March 3, 2017, a little more than a month before the primary, Politico and other national news outlets reported that the FBI was investigating a breach at Georgia’s Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University.”

And a few weeks later, equipment “used to check-in voters at the polls” — including a “flash card with a voter list” — was stolen from a parked car.

A concerned national election integrity advocate, Marilyn Marks, filed a lawsuit to compel Kemp to use hand marked paper ballots (counted on optical scanners) in the race. But Georgia Secretary of State Kemp swiftly defeated it on a procedural technicality (sovereign immunity), declaring that the machines are “safe and accurate.”

Kemp assured voters that Georgia’s voting machines could not be hacked because they aren’t connected to the internet. But he omitted to mention that all voting machines, including those in Georgia, must receive programming before each election from centralized election management systems that can and often do connect to the internet.

Kemp also omitted to mention that Georgia uses a single flash drive to upload its election results from a central tabulator to an online Election Night Reporting System and then reinserts the same flash drive into the same central tabulator for the next round of results. Thus, if the flash drive becomes infected with malware from the online reporting system, it could spread the malware to the central tabulator and change the results from each polling place as they are uploaded. . .

Soon after the new suit was filed, however, Georgia’s Election Center wiped its election server, including backup copies, which would have been a key piece of evidence in the election challenge.

The public outcry was substantial, but Kemp managed to tamp it down by conducting a pilot study of ES&S’s new voting system called the “ExpressVote,” which both he and the media characterized as a “paper ballot system.”

The ES&S executive promoting the ExpressVote in Georgia and throughout the United States is none other than Kathy Rogers, the former Georgia Election Director who helped usher in a generation of paperless Diebold voting machines before taking a job with Diebold and then ES&S, her current employer. . .