Georgia’s Voter Registration Cancellation Site Briefly Exposes Data, With Predictable Results

Election security is still an issue that demands close attention. Unfortunately, the political rhetoric in this country has been controlled by Republicans who continue to insist the last election was “stolen,” despite a complete lack of evidence. This isn’t helping anything. And raiding the Capitol to overturn election results accomplished little else than allowing people to proclaim themselves “patriots” when not being actively prosecuted for federal law violations.

Georgia has been a political hot spot and an area of some concern in terms of election security. This dates back prior to Trump’s false “stolen election” claims, but not before Trump started converting Republican politicians into toadies willing to echo whatever dumb bullshit came out of his mouth.

So, on one hand, we have Governor Brian Kemp’s BS claim that Democrats were “hacking the voter registration system” — something he first declared in 2018 following Trump’s election two years earlier. On the other hand, we have Trump remora/former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani doing whatever he can to prevent his money from ending up in the pockets of the Georgia election workers he spent several months defaming during TV appearances on FOX News and other far-right news outlets.

While it might seem more diplomatic to say the truth lies between these two extremes, the fact is the truth lies much closer to the actual truth than the conspiracy theories pushed by people like Georgia governor Brian Kemp, disgraced former mayor Rudy Giuliani, and the odds-on favorite for Grover Cleveland-ing the nation, Donald Trump.

What’s happening now isn’t helping anything. Georgia’s voter registration system has some problems, like many others across the nation. But Georgia is making headlines because it left some key voter registration data briefly exposed, which has now led to people who think they’re more subversive than they actually are to start cancelling registrations of people they don’t like. Here’s Doug Clark with more details for ProPublica:

On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state’s new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it had identified multiple such attempts — including unsuccessful efforts to cancel the registrations of two prominent Republicans, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

[…]

Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Georgia’s Secretary of State’s Office, said the state had been monitoring cancellation requests for abuse and that’s how it spotted the ones targeting Greene’s and Raffensperger’s registrations.

The Democrats issued the first warning. At first glance, it might appear Democrats were the first to exploit this exposed data. I’m not an idiot so I’m not going to claim this is a false flag operation meant to portray Democrats as cheaters willing to steal the vote. But there’s an equally likely chance this has nothing to with the Democrat party and everything to do with The Internet. It could have been a staffer at a Democratic rep’s office. Or it could have been someone who frequents 8chan. While this is obviously a bad thing, there’s no reason to believe this is the result of a coordinated effort by Democrat party operatives.

Rest assured, it will be portrayed as a conspiracy as soon as it’s politically expedient to do so. And that moment might come sooner than later, what with Trump spending part of his campaign visit to Atlanta, Georgia bad-mouthing the extremely popular (and extremely Republican) governor of the state.

“He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy and he’s a very average governor,” Trump told supporters, eliciting boos toward Kemp from the crowd.

These comments — along with the state’s failure to protect information that would allow people to cancel other people’s voter registrations — are sure to resurface if Trump loses the 2024 election. It will be served up as evidence the election was rigged against him.

And that’s the biggest problem here. This was careless and stupid. But it wasn’t a deliberate attempt to undermine the integrity of the upcoming election. But because it introduces doubt — no matter how thin and easily rebuttable — it just adds fuel to the fire that has been carefully tended since the failed insurrection attempt that greeted the results of the last presidential election. Mistakes will be made because that’s an inescapable fact of life. But these errors matter more now because there’s a considerable percentage of people willing to believe any mistake is a conspiracy and are willing to commit violence to prove their point.