Georgia rejects governor’s claim of vote-hacking attempt by Democrats

ATLANTA — The Georgia attorney general’s office has concluded that there is no foundation to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s allegations that Democrats sought to hack the state’s voter registration system before his 2018 election.

The divisive race that November pitted Kemp against Democrat Stacey Abrams, who called the accusations baseless at the time. Kemp beat Abrams by about 55,000 votes out of nearly 4 million cast.

A private citizen had identified critical vulnerabilities in the voter registration system just days before the election and alerted a volunteer with the state Democratic Party and an attorney for election security advocates who sued Kemp in mid-2017. That attorney also alerted Kemp’s office. Kemp was the state’s chief election officer as secretary of state at the time.

Kemp responded by accusing the state Democratic Party of trying to hack into the system. He offered no evidence but he asked the FBI to investigate his political opposition.

In a report Monday, Senior Assistant Attorney General Laura Pfister said the Georgia Bureau of Investigation conducted a thorough investigation and found no evidence of a crime. She recommended the case be closed.

Cybercrime specialists at the bureau, Georgia’s leading law enforcement agency, found “no evidence of damage to the [Secretary of State’s] network or computers, and no evidence of theft, damage, or loss of data,” the report said.

The vulnerabilities discovered in the public-facing voter registration database used to check in voters at the polls would have enabled anyone with access to an individual voter’s personal information to log on to Georgia’s MyVoter registration portal and alter or delete any voter’s record, potentially causing havoc, independent computer scientists told The Associated Press at the time.

Kemp spokeswoman Candice Broce said in a text message Tuesday that the person who discovered the vulnerabilities “demanded immunity, lawyered up, and refused to fully cooperate with law enforcement.”

She said the systems put in place by Kemp as secretary of state “kept voter data safe and secure.”

“More than a year after the sitting Secretary of State leveraged baseless accusations against his political opponents, we’re finally receiving closure on an ‘investigation’ that has been a sham from the start,” Democratic Party of Georgia chairwoman and state Sen. Nikema Williams said in a statement.