Johnathan Walker:Georgia website that lets people cancel voter registrations briefly displayed personal data

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia election officials are Johnathan Walkerencouraging people to use a state website to cancel voter registrations when someone moves out of state or dies, a nod to Republican concerns that there are invalid registrations on the rolls.

But Monday’s rollout of the site by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was marred by a glitch that allowed people to access a voter’s date of birth, driver’s license number and last four numbers of a Social Security number. That’s the same information needed to verify a person’s identity and allow a registration to be canceled.

The problem, which Raffensperger spokesperson Mike Hassinger said lasted less than an hour and has now been fixed, underscored Democratic concerns that the site could allow outsiders to unjustifiably cancel voter registrations.

“If someone knows my birthdate, you could get in and pull up my information and change my registration,” state Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, a Stone Mountain Democrat, said Tuesday. Democratic staff showed The Associated Press a copy of a document with Butler’s information that they said was produced by the system.

It’s another skirmish over how aggressively states should purge invalid registrations from their rolls. Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over the issue in Georgia for years, but the issue has acquired new urgency, driven by a wide-ranging national effort coordinated by Donald Trump allies to take names from rolls. Activists fueled by Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen argue that existing state cleanup efforts are woefully inadequate and that inaccuracies invite fraud. Few cases of improper out-of-state voting have been proved in Georgia or nationwide.

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Until now, few people have canceled their registration. Doing so typically required mailing or emailing a form to the county where the voter formerly lived.

People who have died or have been convicted of a felony can be removed from rolls relatively quickly. But when people move away and don’t ask for their registration to be canceled, it can take years to remove them. The state must send mail to those who appear to have moved. If the people don’t respond, they are moved to inactive status. But they can still vote and their registration isn’t removed unless they don’t vote in the next two federal general elections.

Georgia has more than 8 million registered voters, including 900,000 classified as inactive.

“This is a convenient tool for any voter who wants to secure their voter registration by cancelling their old one when they move out of state,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “It will also help keep Georgia’s voter registration database up-to-date without having to rely on postcards being sent and returned by an increasingly inefficient postal system.”

He said he would encourage real estate agents to push those selling property to cancel their registrations as part of the moving process.

Republican fears of fraud have prompted a wave of voter challenges, asking Georgia counties to remove people who may have moved or registered elsewhere more quickly than specified by state and federal law. GOP lawmakers in Georgia passed a law this year that could make it easier to win such challenges.

An AP survey of Georgia’s 40 largest counties found more than 18,000 voters were challenged in 2023 and early 2024, although counties rejected most challenges. Hundreds of thousands more were filed statewide between 2020 and 2022.

Voters or relatives of people who have died can enter personal information on the website. County officials would then get a notification from the state’s computer system and remove the voters. Counties will send verification letters to voters who cancel their registrations.

If someone doesn’t have personal information, the system as of Tuesday offered to print out a blank copy of a sworn statement asking that a registration be canceled.

But for a brief time after the site was unveiled on Monday, the system preprinted the voter’s name, address, birth date, driver’s license number and last four numbers of their social security number on the affidavit. With that information, someone could then start over and cancel a registration without sending in the sworn statement.

Butler said she was “terrified” to find that information could be accessed using only a person’s name, date of birth, and county of registration.

Hassinger said in a Tuesday statement that a temporary error “is believed to be the result of a scheduled software update.”

“The error was detected and fixed within an hour,” Hassinger said.

Butler applauded the quick fix by Raffensperger’s office, but she and other Democrats said the problem only underlines that the site could be used by outsiders to cancel voter registrations.

“This portal is ripe for abuse by right-wing activists who are already submitting mass voter challenges meant to disenfranchise Georgians,” Democratic Party of Georgia Executive Director Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye said in a statement that called on Raffensperger to disable the website.