'Ripe for abuse': GA elections chief now allowing anyone to cancel a voter’s registration

01 August 2024

In the critical battleground state of Georgia, voting rights advocates are warning that a new website launched by the state's top elections official will be exploited by bad-faith groups seeking to disenfranchise voters.

USA TODAY recently reported that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger (R) is rolling out a web portal that will allow anyone to request a voter's registration be purged from the state's rolls. The Georgia Voter Registration Cancellation Portal was meant to be a tool for former residents of the Peach State to take themselves off of Georgia's list of registered voters in the event they move, or for family members to remove a deceased relative's name from the database.

Raffensberger said the site will "help keep Georgia’s voter registration database up-to-date without having to rely on postcards being sent and returned by an increasingly inefficient postal system." In order to request the removal of a voter's registration, the portal requires a user put in a voter's first initial, last name, county, date of birth and either the last four digits of the voter's Social Security number or their driver's license number.

However, the site's security was compromised due to a software update that temporarily made voters' personal information like date of birth, drivers license number and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers publicly available. The Georgia Secretary of State's office attributed the issue to a "glitch" caused by a URL routing error, which they said was corrected within an hour.

But now, voting rights advocates say that the site can be used by malicious actors to purge legally registered voters from the system ahead of the November election.

"This portal is ripe for abuse,” Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye — the executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia — said in a statement. “[T]his page is yet another move in Georgia Republicans’ playbook to empower anti-democracy activists, and the Secretary of State must take it down immediately.”

The Georgia Voter Cancellation Portal was created on the heels of the Peach State's Republican-dominated legislature passing Senate Bill 189 this year, which effectively streamlined the process for a voter's registration to be challenged. USA TODAY referred to Senate Bill 189 as a "counterpart" to the controversial Senate Bill 202, which passed in 2021 and allowed for one person to challenge an unlimited number of voter registrations. That bill was notably passed after President Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win Georgia's electoral votes in roughly 30 years, and after Georgia voters elected two Democrats to the U.S. Senate.

Raffensberger claimed the website was necessary in order to prevent "voter fraud," though numerous investigations have found that actual voter fraud happens very rarely and never at a scale that could change the result of an election.

In 2023, the Washington Post analyzed voter fraud investigations in Republican-controlled states, like Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Texas and Virginia and found that out of tens of millions of ballots cast since 2020, prosecutors only secured 47 convictions for voter fraud. And between 2000 and 2014, Loyola University Law School-Los Angeles professor Justin Leavitt found only 31 credible instances of voter fraud out of more than one billion ballots cast.

Click here to read USA TODAY's report in full.

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