ATLANTA — Just days after Georgia launched a new online portal for people to cancel their voter registration, reports show that there were multiple attempts to use it against Georgia state officials.
Those officials include Brad Raffensperger and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, according to ProPublica.
As Channel 2 Action News reported last week, the same registration website temporarily exposed some personal voter information online.
State officials acknowledged that an error on the site on July 29 exposed some personal identifying information, but only to those who already had some of that information.
State Sen. Gloria Butler, a Democrat from Stone Mountain, was among those whose information was exposed.
Butler was alerted to the issue by another lawmaker and found that by using her date of birth, her staff could access some of her personal information.
She told Channel 2′s Richard Elliot that she was concerned that a bad actor might have canceled her voter registration without her knowledge or consent.
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“I thought it was very dangerous for all that information to come up. That’s a privacy issue,” Butler said. “That’s the first thing I thought of. Somebody else could’ve gone in and canceled me out.”
Gabe Sterling, Chief Operating Officer for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, acknowledged the error and stated that it had been accessed only a handful of times.
“We discovered it. We fixed it within an hour, and it was corrected so people’s identifying information was protected and there was never any release of data,” Sterling said.
Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Georgia’s Secretary of State’s Office, told ProPublica that the state had been monitoring cancellation requests for abuse and that’s how it spotted the ones targeting Greene’s and Raffensperger’s registrations.
He also said that anyone caught trying to abuse the portal could be charged with a felony.
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