Georgia candidate who is election official is under renewed scrutiny

ATLANTA — Secretary of State Brian Kemp has had two roles this year: Running Georgia’s elections and running for governor of the state.

Democrats, including former President Jimmy Carter, have called on him to step aside, warning repeatedly of potential conflicts of interest.

Kemp is now facing renewed scrutiny after his office announced Sunday — without providing evidence and doing so just hours before Election Day — that it is investigating the Georgia Democratic Party for an alleged hack of the state’s voter registration system.

The move to publicly disclose the probe appeared to break with tradition in the office, which oversees voting integrity, as it differed from how Kemp’s team handled an earlier cyber breach at Kennesaw State University.

Edgardo Cortes, Virginia’s former elections commissioner, called Sunday’s announcement “bizarre” and said the timing of it is “problematic,” adding he wouldn’t have done it had he been in Kemp’s shoes. Such public statements, Cortes said, could depress voter turnout by making people question the reliability of the election system.

“It all just sounds very strange,” said Cortes, an election security advisor for the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit institute at New York University’s School of Law. “You suddenly open an investigation without giving any sort of details about what happened? In Virginia, we would never have done something like that because I think it would have created a lot of concern among voters.”

Further, Cortes questioned why Kemp’s office said Sunday that no personal data was breached and that the system remains secure despite the attempted hack.

“It is kind of hard to make that determination without actually going through and doing a thorough investigation,” he said.

Kemp’s office said the FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security had been alerted. The FBI declined to comment Sunday. And a federal Homeland Security official referred questions to Kemp’s office.

On Sunday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution filed a request with Kemp’s office under Georgia’s Open Records Act for documents about the probe as well as correspondence between his staff, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Kemp declined to comment but a spokesperson defended the probe.

This isn’t the first time Kemp’s office has dealt with a cyber breach. In 2017, the FBI investigated accusations that millions of Georgia voters may have had their personal information compromised. The allegations involved Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems, which oversaw the state’s election operations and voting machines through an agreement with the Secretary of State’s Office. That arrangement has since been terminated.

In that case, state elections officials did not publicly disclose the breach but provided details only after reporters began asking questions. The same was true in an earlier state breach by Kemp’s office in 2015. That raises questions for some observers about why this instance was treated differently. The Secretary of State’s office does not keep a complete archive of its press releases online so it was not possible to learn Sunday whether there were other times when the office announced investigations.

Cathy Cox, a former Democratic nominee for Georgia governor, said she could not recall making a similar announcement about an investigation during the two terms she served as Georgia’s secretary of state.

“For the sake of getting the best information you can in an investigation, you just don’t typically put those matters out on the street,” said Cox, dean of Mercer University’s School of Law. “And it is just not fair, I think, to anybody involved in it to try it in the public when you are trying to conduct a bona fide and fair investigation.”