Some try to cancel Georgia GOP politicians’ voter registrations

( NewsNation ) — Georgia’s new online portal was used multiple times to try canceling voter registrations for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, ProPublica reports.

These attempts were unsuccessful and were spotted by the Secretary of State’s office as it monitored cancellation requests made in the portal for alleged abuse, Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for the office, told ProPublica.

Hassinger, to ProPublica, defended the portal by saying it has protections to prevent bad actors from canceling people’s voter registrations without their permission.

These include warnings on the portal stating that abusing it is a potential felony, features that stop users from submitting multiple cancellations, county election workers reviewing requests and a postcard sent out to voters whose registration is terminated. Consequences for those impersonating someone to cancel a voter registration are an up to 10-year prison sentence and a possible $100,000 fine.

“Can this site be used to cancel a legitimate voter’s registration?” Hassinger said. “Yes, in the same sense that it is possible to win a lottery without buying a ticket. The wind could blow the winning ticket into your pocket. Not likely, but theoretically possible.”

Hassinger told ProPublica that Raffensperger was unavailable for comment. NewsNation reached out to Greene’s office.

This news follows reports by The Associated Press and The Current showing that the portal had glitches that exposed people’s personal information, including their date of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their full driver’s license numbers.

Georgia Senate Democrats warned of such issues when the portal was first rolled out in July, saying it “empowers conspiracy theorists and other bad actors to deny Georgians the right to vote.”

“We demand this be taken down immediately,” Democrats said in a tweet.

ProPublica writes that Hassinger said there have been discussions about improving software rollouts in the future, such as with additional testing, more in-house coding and increasing the budget for this kind of work.

Georgia Voter Registration Cancellation Portal

According to the AP, the glitches showing people’s personal information lasted less than an hour before being fixed the first time. Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, told The Current that the second security flaw was also resolved.

“We’ve taken steps to mitigate it and make sure it doesn’t happen,” Sterling said in The Current.

Voter registration has become a sticking point for Democrats and Republicans, especially in Georgia, where the two parties have been fighting over the issue for years. It came to a head in 2020, with activists fueled by Trump’s lies that the presidential election was stolen claiming current procedures by the state to prevent fraud were inadequate.

Saying it’s meant to increase voter roll accuracy, Raffensperger said the portal announced last month is a “convenient tool for any voter.”

Raffensperger said the portal would help those moving out of state and aim to keep Georgia’s voter registration database “up-to-date without having to use postcards.”

The AP notes that few cases of improper out-of-state voting have been proved in Georgia, which has 8 million people registered, or nationwide. A previous study by The Washington Post found only 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014 out of more than 1 billion ballots cast.

Research done at Columbia University showed only 24 people were convicted of or pleaded guilty to illegal voting between 2002 and 2005, an average of eight people a year. Available state-level evidence of voter fraud, taken from interviews, reviews of newspaper coverage and court proceedings, “while not definitive, is also negligible,” the author of the Columbia study said.

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