Some voting rights advocates fear a new web portal designed to allow former Georgians to easily cancel their Peach State voter registration could be used to fraudulently purge Black voters from the rolls.
The new Voter Registration Cancellation web portal, which launched on Monday, requires users to input personal information such as their first and last name, date of birth, driver’s license number and the last four digits of their Social Security number in order to cancel their Georgia voter registrations.
Voting rights activists say the online portal makes it possible for bad actors to cancel the registrations of unknowing, lawful voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
“We know that there are groups that are organizing to purge large numbers of Black people and people of color,” Georgia NAACP President Gerald Griggs told Capital B Atlanta. “This [web portal] makes it easier for them to do this.”
Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says the purpose of the portal is to make it easier for people moving out of Georgia to secure their voter registration in their new state of residence by canceling their old one.
“We do voter list maintenance in Georgia every day,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “This is one more method that’s convenient for voters and efficient for election officials.”
Mike Hassinger, public information officer for elections in the secretary of state’s office, defended the portal’s security.
“We’ve got security protocols in place to monitor and record the time, date, location and device that the cancellation request was generated from,” Hassinger said. “Anybody who’s canceled for a malicious action would be notified, just like all voters would be notified.”
Hassinger said the state sends postcards to the listed address of anyone whose voter registration has been canceled, giving them time to re-register prior to Election Day. Those who don’t receive the postcard in time can still vote on Election Day using a provisional ballot, he said.
Provisional ballots are counted if the county registrar’s office can establish a voter’s eligibility within three days, according to the secretary of state’s website.
“You would be given a provisional ballot and allowed to cast your vote, and then the process of undoing your registration cancellation would begin,” Hassinger said.
The web portal’s creation comes less than three months after Gov. Brian Kemp signed a law outlining people’s ability to submit mass voter registration challenges.
Conservative activists and election watchdog groups like True the Vote and the Election Integrity Network — chaired by Donald Trump’s former volunteer attorney Cleta Mitchell, according to the group’s website — have used the mass voter eligibility challenge provision included in the state’s Election Integrity Act, which was passed in 2021, against thousands of registered voters in Georgia in the past three years, according to the New Georgia Project.
Most of those challenges have been dismissed by county boards of elections across the state, but Griggs says the state’s new voter registration cancellation web portal would allow 2020 election deniers to disenfranchise lawful voters ahead of the 2024 election in November.
Griggs suggested the potential for fraud, misuse, and abuse on the website is concerning and deliberate.
“It’s fraught with problems, and it’s going to cause more issues with people being erroneously removed from the voter rolls,” he said. “It’s just disingenuous for the secretary of state to sit there and say that this is anything other than another tool of voter suppression.”
The registration cancellation website also closely resembles the GA My Voter web page designed to register Georgians to vote, which could confuse people looking to get registered ahead of November’s election, according to New Georgia Project Policy Director Stephanie Ali.
“This is part of an ongoing process at the state level to make the entire voting process seem more confusing and harder than it is,” Ali told Capital B Atlanta.
Hassinger pushed back on the notion that the new web portal is mean to disenfranchise voters.
“How on earth does this make voting harder?” he said. “We take election security and voter security very seriously. That’s our top priority. We also balance that against voter convenience. That’s our mission every day.”
