I have written this piece for Slate. It begins:
In perhaps the most outrageous example of election administration partisanship in the modern era, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is running for governor while simultaneously in charge of the state’s elections, has accused the Democratic Party without evidence of hacking into the state’s voter database. He plastered a headline about it on the Secretary of State’s website, which thousands of voters use to get information about voting on election day.
It’s just the latest in a series of partisan moves by Kemp, who has held up more than 50,000 voter registrations for inconsistencies as small as a missing hyphen, fought rules to give voters a chance to prove their identity when their absentee ballot applications are rejected for a lack of a signature match, and been aggressive in prosecuting those who have done nothing more than try to help those in need of assistance in casting ballots.
But the latest appalling move by Kemp to publicly accuse the Democrats of hacking without evidence is even worse than that: Kemp has been one of the few state election officials to refuse help from the federal Department of Homeland Security to deter foreign and domestic hacking of voter registration databases. After computer scientists demonstrated the insecurity of the state’s voting system, he was sued for having perhaps the most vulnerableelection system in the country. His office has been plausibly accused of destroying evidence, which would have helped to prove the vulnerabilities of the state election system….
WhoWhatWhy issued a report early on Sunday morning that seemed to explain what was going on.
Just before noon on Saturday, a third party provided WhoWhatWhy with an email and document, sent from the Democratic Party of Georgia to election security experts, that highlights ‘massive’ vulnerabilities within the state’s My Voter Page and its online voter registration system. According to the document, it would not be difficult for almost anyone with minimal computer expertise to access millions of people’s private information and potentially make changes to their voter registration — including canceling it.
If this is true, it doesn’t show Democrats “hacking” to manipulate election results. It shows Democrats, like many others, pointing out the glaring security flaws in Georgia’s voting system. To turn this around and blame Democrats is an act of political chutzpah by an election official on par with nothing else I’ve seen.
