Dems slam hacking claim made by office of GOP candidate
ATLANTA — The office of Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, who is also the Republican nominee for governor, said Sunday that authorities had opened an inquiry into the Democratic Party of Georgia after “a failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system.”
Kemp’s office offered no evidence or details that could be independently verified Sunday, and Democratic leaders were quick to call the allegation false, portraying the inquiry as an abuse of power — Kemp is also overseeing the election — and a political stunt two days before a historic vote in Georgia.
Kemp is locked in a tight race with the Democratic nominee, Stacey Abrams, who would become the first African American woman to lead any state. She denounced the inquiry Sunday as a “desperate” move.
The sudden release of the four-sentence statement about the investigation infuriated Georgia Democrats frustrated with Kemp, whom opponents have portrayed as a “master of voter suppression” because of purges of voter rolls and additional limits on voting. He has repeatedly refused calls to step down as secretary of state to avoid perceptions of bias.
Georgia’s voting procedures and laws have been subject to numerous legal challenges and formal complaints leading up to election day. As recently as Friday, a judge sided with critics of Kemp in one case, stating the procedures for verifying the eligibility of voters whose citizenship was in question were “creating confusion as election day looms.”
The secretary of state’s investigation is also likely to further inflame the rancorous national debate over Republicans’ allegations of electoral fraud — many of which have proved to be baseless — and whether those claims are being used to unfairly harm the Democrats’ electoral chances.
Voting rights and suppression are particularly combustible issues in Georgia, a Deep South state with a long history of denying the franchise to people of color. Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state since 2010, is white and is the favored candidate of Trump, who has falsely claimed that millions of people voted illegally in his November 2016 victory.
Kemp’s office has overseen legal purges of more than 2 million inactive voters from the rolls since 2012 and stalled more than 50,000 applications filed by voters, most of them black. But he has called charges of suppression a “farce” and said he had “made it easier to vote and harder to cheat in our state,” noting that Georgia has added 1 million voters to the rolls since he took office.
Abrams, in a round of television interviews Sunday, said Democrats had done nothing wrong and accused Kemp of “trying to rile up his base by misleading voters yet again,” as she put it to an Atlanta TV station.
Kemp’s office said the FBI was notified about the inquiry into the alleged hack. Kevin Rowson, a spokesman in the FBI’s Atlanta field office, said the bureau had no comment. When the FBI receives referrals, agents decide whether to proceed with an investigation.