Dems renew concerns about Georgia's voter registration cancellation portal

(The Center Square) — Amid a report that voters' personal information was temporarily accessible online, critics are renewing their concerns about Georgia's Voter Registration Cancellation Portal.

The information, including a voter's date of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security number and their driver's license number, was briefly available on the portal, a new tool that allows voters to proactively cancel their voter registrations, the Associated Press reported. That information is what's needed to request a registration cancellation.

Following the report, Georgia Democrats expressed their concerns, even seizing the opportunity to tie it to the party's anti-Republican buzzword of the moment: "Weird."

"This 'voter cancellation' portal was already ripe for abuse by the very people submitting mass voter challenges meant to shrink the electorate by disenfranchising Georgians," Democratic Party of Georgia Executive Director Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye said in a statement.

"On top of that, its botched rollout has now jeopardized the voting rights and the personal identifying information of Georgians across the state," Olasanoye added. "Rushing to implement election system updates to appease weird conspiracy theorists raising unfounded concerns about non-existing voter fraud – because they still can't accept their candidate lost in 2020 – makes this situation both unacceptable and all too predictable."

A spokesman for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, previously told The Center Square that tampering with another voter's registration is a felony and that the submission via the Voter Registration Cancellation Portal is just a request and not a definitive voter cancellation.

"During the first morning of the Voter Cancellation Request portal our office took action to address a temporary URL routing error that in some instances allowed voters wishing to cancel their record to view their own driver's license or SSN in a cancellation form after entering in their date of birth, name, county of residence, and taking a specific series of steps," the secretary of state's office said in a Friday statement to The Center Square. "This URL routing error is believed to be the result of a scheduled software update and was quickly corrected. The error was detected and fixed within an hour. Just because bad actors would be easy to detect doesn't mean we don't also take steps to prevent them from acting."

Spokespeople for Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who served as Georgia's secretary of state from 2010 to 2018, did not respond to a request for comment on the DPG's concerns.