Georgia’s Voter Registration Cancellation Site Briefly Exposes Data, With Predictable Results
from the do-better-or-prepare-for-the-worst dept
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.
Filed Under: e-voting, elections, georgia, vulnerabilties
Comments on “Georgia’s Voter Registration Cancellation Site Briefly Exposes Data, With Predictable Results”
'I am shocked, shocked I say that our easily exploitable system was exploited!'
On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state’s new online portal for canceling voter registrations
Maybe I’m missing something but while I can see why it would be important for a person to be able to register for voting, change their voter registration, and/or make sure it’s correct, why is voter registration cancellation even a thing they’re offering? If you don’t want to vote in a particular election(or all of them) just don’t vote.
If anything adding a system to cancel voter registration this close to an election strikes me as more likely to be a conspiracy to meddle in the election than some idiots trying to get major politicians de-registered, as that positively reeks of setting the stage for either claiming foul should the election not go their way(‘The only way convicted felon Trump lost was because republicans had their registrations revoked, so we refuse to accept the result!’), or claiming reluctant victory even should there be evidence of foul play(‘While there have been claims that a number of democrat voters had their registrations revoked, rendering them unable to vote the current count has convicted felon Trump in the lead, so he’s who’ll get the state’s EC votes while we look into the allegations of fraud’).
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Disclosure: I’ve been a volunteer, registering voters in another state, for 18 years. (And by the way, we’re required to register everyone, regardless of party affiliation. And we do.)
You’re correct to observe that facilitating cancellation is a very curious thing. There are pretty robust mechanisms for automatically cancelling registration when things happen that should trigger that, e.g.: death of the voter or registration of the voter in another state. These aren’t perfect, but they work well enough that the handful of mistakes they generate are manageable with manual processes.
So I concur with you that adding this seems like a setup so that Republicans can once again launch a thousand spurious claims, just like they did when Trump lost. (Of course, as we discovered, there were very few cases of actual voter fraud, and the majority of those were, predictably, committed by Republicans.)
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Stop saying "without evidence".
Seriously, there was a massive amount of evidence in multiple states.
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Screeching wild conspiracy theories does not constitute “evidence.” HTH.
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Be silent, Trumptard. The grownups are talking. Why don’t you drink a nice bottle of drain cleaner?
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That’s not fair. He wanted them to inject bleach, not drink drain cleaner.
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If that were true, at least one court case would have succeeded for Trump and friends. Instead it’s ended a bunch of careers, businesses and will put people in jail.
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“Seriously, there was a massive amount of evidence in multiple states.”
If you want us to believe you, you will need to show this “massive amount of evidence” to us. Seriously.
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Don’t ask to see it. It’s just Hunter’s dick. It’s a right wing rick roll with way too much setup.
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What happens when all the evidence points to the Republican Party doing all that delicious voter fraud (which was never that prevalent to begin with?)
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
Re: Don’t make me get the rolled up newspaper bro
As evidenced by well over 100 lost lawsuits.
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If by “evidence”, you mean “accusations”, even if they don’t actually demonstrate election or voter fraud, then yes. Otherwise, no, there was not massive evidence of either in even one state, let alone multiple. Several court rulings have said as much, and none have agreed that there was massive evidence of fraud.
There have been some individual instances of intentional fraud, along with a few misunderstandings that were quickly resolved and their votes not counted, but they were few in number, almost never would have affect the results of any issue or election on the ballot had they not been caught in time, and—of the intentional fraud—were almost exclusively pro-Republican.
So yeah, it is perfectly reasonable for people to say the claims were without accusations.
Nits
It’s the “Democratic Party” not the “Democrat party.”
“…dumb bullshit came out of his mouth.” Dumb is the inability speak, so probably “stupid bullshit” or “insane” or “inane” or “unbelievably whacky stupid insane inane bullshit”. Not dumb. Think of the ADA and the crying Indian.
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That’s correct: “Democratic Party” is the right term and this article should be edited to reflect that.
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Isn’t it handy when you can just choose one of the meanings a word has to make a stupid argument?
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dumb
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U dum as brix.
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True, and this ought to be corrected.
“Dumb” has multiple meanings. “Unable to speak” is just one. Another is “stupid”. There’s also “temporarily unable or unwilling to speak” and (for computer terminals) “able only to transmit data to or receive data from a computer; having no independent processing capability”. And it can also be used as a verb, either by itself (meaning “to make dumb or unheard; to silence”) or as the verb phrase “to dumb down” (meaning “to simplify or reduce the intellectual content of something so as to make it accessible to a larger number of people”). (The latter definition clearly comes from its definition as a synonym for “stupid”.)
In fact, using “dumb” to describe a person who is unable to speak due to a disability (as opposed to temporary surprise or something like that) is considered to be outdated and offensive. I believe the currently proper term for that nowadays is “mute”.
So not only are you factually wrong to suggest that using “dumb” as a synonym for stupid is incorrect and/or offensive, you’re actually using a definition that is both offensive itself and obsolete.
But yeah, “dumb” is frequently used as a synonym for “stupid” (at least in North America), far more often than it is used to as a synonym for “mute”. Heck, where I’m from, the former is by far the most common usage for it, and it’s also extremely common on the internet. Maybe do some research before correcting people.
I have no idea who “the crying Indian” is or what you’re referring to, but as for the ADA, I’m pretty sure disabled persons are more bothered by people using “dumb” as a synonym for “mute” than “dumb” as a synonym for “stupid”.
That's not how you do it...
Trying to de-register TWO high profile Republicans is not how you steal an election…
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It is when one of them is Donald J. Trump and the other is JD Vance, according to Trump.
It would be nice if all voters had protection from fraudulent cancellations, not just prominent Republicans.
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Republicans would never win again. The party is not viable without voter suppression.
The Truth Lies
Some people say the sun rises in the East.
Others say the sun rises in the West.
The truth lies probably somewhere in between.
(sometimes one polar extreme is actually the truth)
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Truth is ..
the sun does not rise, the horizon goes down.
I live in Atlanta
Everybody praised Brad Raffensburger for failing to follow Donald Trump’s coup attempt, and he does deserve praise for that. However, I suspect he just didn’t want to go to prison on behalf of Trump because I’ve lived here for a long time and he has no problem whatsoever with voter suppression and disenfranchisement. His only red line is not doing anything blatantly illegal. Other than that, he’s game.