It appears that the Russians aren’t the only ones trying to hack our elections.
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is the Republican candidate for governor, announced that his office has opened an investigation into the state Democratic Party over possible cyber crimes.
Kemp said he had notified federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.
“While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation, I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes,” Kemp’s spokeswoman Candice Broce said. “We can also confirm that no personal data was breached and our system remains secure.”
Democrats are calling “foul.” The Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams, believes the investigation is bogus.
“This is a desperate attempt on the part of my opponent to distract people from the fact that two different federal judges found him derelict of his duties and have forced him to allow absentee ballots to be counted and those who are being held captive by the exact-match system to be allowed to vote,” Ms. Abrams said.
The “exact match” system simply says that new registrations must match the name of the applicant exactly. This would seem to be a no-brainer, except asking people to use the same name on their application that they used to register is too much trouble and has a “negative impact on African-American, Latino and Asian-American voters,” according to liberal activist groups. They call it “voter suppression.”
No details of the alleged cyber crimes have been released, but there was apparently an attempt to hack the voter registration database.
CNN reports that the state party is claiming an “abuse of power” by Kemp. “This political stunt from Kemp just days before the election is yet another example of why he cannot be trusted and should not be overseeing an election in which he is also a candidate for governor,” the state party’s executive director, Rebecca DeHart, said in a statement.
This has been a nasty race with accusations by Democrats that Kemp is stoking racial hatred. There was an actual robocall from a white supremacist group. Abrams is trying to become the first black governor of Georgia, which is why the media has been intensely covering the race.
Kemp has been trying to true the vote in Georgia, removing dead people from the rolls and also trying to remove the names of those who haven’t voted in a while. The latter reason might be suspect, although there are probably as many Republicans on the list as there are Democrats. Needless to say, removing anyone from the registration list — dead or otherwise — is seen as “voter suppression” by Democrats.
Suppressing the vote of the dead is probably a good idea if you want a free and fair election. But given that Democrats have apparently tried to hack the voter registration database, perhaps we should be asking what exactly they were up to.
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