Gotta probe Dem ‘hack’
Ga. GOP gov hopeful cries foul
Just two days before a closely contested election, Georgia’s secretary of state — the state’s GOP candidate for governor — announced a probe of alleged Democratic hacking of the state’s voter registration system.
Brian Kemp — in a close race for governor with Stacey Abrams, a Democrat — blamed Abrams’ party for what he called a “failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system.”
“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 cybercrimes,” Candice Broce, spokeswoman for the secretary of state, said in a statement Sunday. “We can also confirm that no personal data was breached and our system remains secure.”
Kemp’s office said it has asked the FBI to become involved in the probe.
Democrats have called for Kemp (photo right) to recuse himself as the state’s top election official while he seeks Georgia’s highest office.
Rebecca DeHart, the executive director of the state’s Democratic Party, called the investigation “yet another example of abuse of power by an unethical secretary of state.”
“To be very clear, Brian Kemp’s scurrilous claims are 100% false, and this so-called investigation was unknown to the Democratic Party of Georgia until a campaign operative in Kemp’s official office released a statement this morning,” DeHart said.
She called the investigation a “political stunt” that shows Kemp “cannot be trusted and should not be overseeing an election in which he is also a candidate for governor.”
Abrams (photo left), the former minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, also blasted the probe.
“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 in his duties and have forced him to accept absentee ballots to be counted and those who are being held captive by the exact match system to be allowed to vote,” she said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The Georgia gubernatorial race has been dominated by allegations of voter suppression. An Associated Press report said 53,000 people — 80% of them African-American — were in danger of not being registered to vote because of a law that says voter registration records must exactly match voters’ drivers license and Social Security information.
On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Eleanor Ross granted an emergency injunction to return voting rights to 3,141 people who had been taken off the rolls because of the so-called “exact match” law.
“The election scheme here places a severe burden on these individuals,” Ross ruled, adding that the court had “grave concerns” about “the differential treatment inflicted on a group of individuals who are predominantly minorities.”
Kemp previously accused the Department of Homeland Security of an “unsuccessful attempt to penetrate the Georgia secretary of state’s firewall” in 2016. But the DHS inspector general found that the alleged data attack was “the result of normal and automatic computer message exchanges.”
An Emerson College poll of 724 likely voters released Friday found Kemp leading Abrams by 2 percentage points.
If she wins, Abrams would be the first black woman to serve as governor in the U.S.