Marjorie Taylor Greene’s and Brad Raffensperger’s Voter Registrations Targeted in Georgia’s New Online Portal

Caption

The efforts to cancel the voter registrations of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., via the state’s new online portal were unsuccessful.

Credit: Associated Press and Georgia.gov

Doug Bock Clark, ProPublica

This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

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On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state’s new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it had identified multiple such attempts — including unsuccessful efforts to cancel the registrations of two prominent Republicans, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

The confirmation of the attempts to misuse the portal follows separate discoveries by The Associated Press and The Current that the portal suffered at least two security glitches that briefly exposed voters’ dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their full driver’s license numbers — the exact information needed to cancel others’ voter registrations.

Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Georgia’s Secretary of State’s Office, said 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 said that additional protections for less high-profile voters include warnings on the portal that abusing it could be a felony, features built into the website to prevent a single user from submitting multiple cancellations, reviews of requests by county election workers and a postcard that alerts voters whose registration is canceled. He said those safeguards make it extremely difficult to successfully cancel someone else’s voter registration. “Can this site be used to cancel a legitimate voter’s registration?” Hassinger said. “Yes, in the same sense that it is possible to win a lottery without buying a ticket. The wind could blow the winning ticket into your pocket. Not likely, but theoretically possible.”

Hassinger said that Raffensperger was unavailable for comment. Greene’s congressional office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“Instead of apologizing and working to fix the problem, Brad Raffensperger is denying it exists,” said Max Flugrath, director of communications for Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy organization. “If the secretary of state won’t do what it takes to protect Georgians and their voting access, advocates will do everything we can to ensure voters have the information needed to register, cast a ballot and have their vote count.”

The official X account for Georgia Senate Democrats posted that the voter registration cancellation portal “empowers conspiracy theorists and other bad actors to deny Georgians the right to vote.” In response, one commenter replied with the birthdays of Republican officials, including Greene and Raffensperger, noting: “​​Lots of people have their birthday in the public domain.” One user posted, “Overwhelm them with cancelled well-known Republican's registrations!”

To start the cancellation process on the portal, all users need is a voter’s name, date of birth and county of residence. To finalize the cancellation request, they also must provide the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number or their full driver’s license number. There’s also an option to fill out a form with that information and print and send it to the voter’s county election office or the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. Hassinger said that election workers would not approve any paper request that lacked a Social Security number or driver’s license number.

The portal warns users that impersonating someone to cancel a voter registration is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. Hassinger said the Secretary of State’s Office was consulting with in-house legal experts about whether to seek charges for the individuals who had attempted to cancel Raffensperger’s and Greene’s registrations.

According to Hassinger, information submitted to the portal is forwarded to the county election office where the voter is registered; workers there make the call about whether to approve the cancellation request. If they do, a postcard is sent to the voter’s address warning them that they will be removed unless the voter responds. A voter who missed the postcard and then tried to vote could still cast a provisional ballot, he said, which would still be counted once the voter attested that they had not intended for their registration to be canceled.

The July 29 launch of the portal came on the heels of legislation in 2021 and 2024 that has made it easier for Georgia residents to challenge voter registrations. Right-wing activists have challenged tens of thousands of voters in the state, though that process is different.

Hassinger said the cancellation website has built-in features that should prevent one user from submitting numerous cancellation requests. He also said the Secretary of State’s Office launched the site at the suggestion of its IT department, to make it easier and more secure for voters to cancel their registration when they move out of the state. He said the effort was independent of any of the provisions in the recent legislation or pressure from right-wing voter registration challengers.

The federally mandated process for election officials to remove inactive registrations takes years, with elections officials required to attempt to contact voters to verify that they have moved.

Hassinger said that the security measures of the site have proven effective, and because of that there have not been discussions about changing them. However, he said that there have been talks about improving software rollouts in the future, including potentially doing additional testing, bringing more coding in-house and increasing the budget for such work.

Hassinger also said the portal is more secure than the previous ways of canceling a voter’s registration, which required sensitive personal information to be sent via unencrypted emails or the mail, which could make tempting targets for identity thieves.

“We want to protect voters’ personally identifiable information,” Hassinger said. “That’s part of running secure elections, and that’s the job that we take very seriously.”