In a last-ditch effort to turn the tables on the election he has been accused of trying to steal ever since he became the state’s Republican nominee for Governor, Georgia’s Secretary of State announced that his office is investigating the Democratic party for an alleged attempt to hack the vote.
The Washington Post reports that Kemp announced the investigation on Saturday evening, and by Sunday, when voters went to the state’s website to find out their polling places, they were greeted with the headline: “AFTER FAILED HACKING ATTEMPT, SOS LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO GEORGIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY.”
“We opened an investigation into the Democratic Party of Georgia after receiving information from our legal team about failed efforts to breach the online voter registration system and My Voter Page,” reads a statement on the Secretary of State’s website. “We have contacted our federal partners and formally requested the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate these possible cyber crimes.”
It is important to note that Georgia’s election systems that Kemp oversees are rated among the worst in the country, earning a D grade from the Center for American Progress’s election security report. In 2016, after the state’s servers were compromised, Kemp was the only Secretary of State to refuse help from the federal government to see if Russians had hacked the servers, according to Politico.
When cybersecurity expert Logan Lamb showed how the system’s servers could be exploited to reveal the passwords, voter rolls and voting machine software, the Coalition for Good Governance wanted the FBI to examine the servers. Instead, the Associated Press reported that Kemp had the servers wiped clean. Time after time, Kemp has asserted that no one could compromise his state’s voter systems.
Until today.
Kemp has also disproportionately purged black voter registrations, tossed out absentee ballots, attempted to make voters show proof of citizenship and closed voting locations in predominately black areas. And every step of the way, he has been overruled by the courts.
Because he is neck and neck with his Democratic opponent Stacy Abrams’ some have said that the move seems a little desperate, noted the Washington Post:
The announcement, which contained no details on the alleged “cyber crimes” in which it suggests state Democrats were involved, was immediately condemned as a political ploy by Democrats and some commentators, who believe Kemp should not oversee an election in which he is competing.
“Brian Kemp’s scurrilous claims are 100 percent false, and this so-called investigation was unknown to the Democratic Party of Georgia until a campaign operative in Kemp’s official office released a statement this morning,” Rebecca DeHart, executive director of the state Democratic Party, wrote in a statement to reporters. “This is yet another example of abuse of power by an unethical Secretary of State.”
But maybe Kemp isn’t desperate. Maybe he’s being smart.
Votes in Georgia are stored on memory cards which are physically collected and driven to a central location where they are tallied. As the person in charge of verifying the state’s election, what if he Kemp is laying the legal groundwork to eliminate the possibility of Democratic oversight when the votes are counted? Because the voting machines in the state are outdated and have no paper ballots, Georgia’s voting results are virtually inauditable.
So who’s gonna count behind Brian Kemp?
Is it even possible for anyone to count behind him?
Since he took office, voters in Georgia, judges and outside experts have been screaming that Brian Kemp is rigging the state’s vote. But Brian Kemp did nothing about it until today, when, for the first time, polls show that the two candidates are in a virtual tie.
But of course, like they say in Georgia:
If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.