ATLANTA– Georgia election officials are encouraging people to cancel their voter registrations through a state website when someone moves to another state or dies, citing Republican concerns about invalid registrations on the rolls.
But the site’s rollout on Monday 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 the last four digits of a Social Security number — the same information needed to verify a person’s identity and cancel a registration.
Raffensperger spokesman Mike Hassinger said the problem lasted less than an hour and has since been resolved, underscoring Democrats’ concerns that the site could allow outsiders to improperly cancel voter registrations.
“If someone knows my date of birth, you can come in and pull my information and change my registration,” state Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, a Democrat from Stone Mountain, said Tuesday. Democratic aides showed The Associated Press a copy of a document with Butler’s information that they said was generated by the system.
It’s a new skirmish over how aggressively states should remove invalid registrations from their registries. Democrats and Republicans have fight over the issue in Georgia for years, but the problem has taken on a new urgency, driven by a a broad national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to purge names from the rolls. Activists, fueled by Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen, claim that the state’s existing cleanup efforts are woefully inadequate and that any inaccuracies are enabling fraud. Few cases of out-of-state voting fraud have been proven in Georgia or nationwide.
So far, few people have canceled their registrations. This usually required mailing a form to the county where the voter previously lived.
People who are deceased or convicted of a crime can be removed from the rolls relatively quickly. But if people move and don’t ask to have their registrations canceled, it can take years to remove them. The state must send mail to those who appear to have moved. If people don’t respond, they are moved to inactive status. But they can still vote, and their registrations aren’t removed unless they don’t vote in the next two federal general elections.
Georgia has more than 8 million registered voters, of which 900,000 are classified as inactive.
“This is a helpful tool for any voter who wants to protect their voter registration by canceling their old registration 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 mail and return postcards through an increasingly inefficient postal system.”
He said he would encourage real estate agents to urge property sellers to cancel their registration as part of the moving process.
Republican fears of fraud have led to a wave of voter challenges, asking Georgia counties to remove people who may have moved or registered elsewhere more quickly than required by state and federal law. GOP lawmakers in Georgia passed a law this year which could make it easier to win such challenges.
An AP survey of Georgia’s 40 largest counties found that more than 18,000 voters were required to cast ballots in 2023 and early 2024, though most precincts were conducting balloting. Hundreds of thousands more were filed across the state between 2020 and 2022.
Voters or next of kin of deceased individuals can enter personal information on the website. County officials then receive a notification from the state’s computer system and remove the voters. Counties send verification letters to voters who cancel their registration.
Since Tuesday, if someone does not have personal information, the system has offered the option to print a blank copy of an affidavit requesting that the registration be canceled.
But for a short time after the site was unveiled Monday, the system pre-printed the voter’s name, address, date of birth, driver’s license number and the last four digits of their Social Security number on the affidavit. With that information, someone could start over and cancel a registration without sending in the affidavit.
Butler said she was “terrified” when she discovered information could only be accessed using a person’s name, date of birth and district of registration.
Hassinger said in a statement Tuesday that a temporary glitch “is believed to be the result of a planned software update.”
“The error was discovered and fixed within an hour,” Hassinger said.
Butler welcomed the quick resolution from Raffensperger’s office, but she and other Democrats said the problem only shows that the site can be used by outsiders to cancel voter registrations.
“This portal is ripe for abuse by right-wing activists who are already protesting the election en masse to disenfranchise Georgians,” said Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia, in a statement urging Raffensperger to disable the website.