In Georgia, the 11th hour daggers on the voting system

ATLANTA – Georgia's online voters database has turned into a last minute curve in one of the country's most prominent governor races, with Republican candidate Brian Kemp making an allegation of hacking against the Democrats, while the gaping vulnerability of a system controlled by Kemp as secretary appeared. d & # 39; State.

Kemp 's office did not detail the infamous actions that the Democrats allegedly committed, he provided no evidence of Sunday' s unusual action which means that the election 's chief of staff. State opened an investigation into his partisan opposition a few days before the elections.

Polls suggest that Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams are stuck in a tight race that, even before Sunday, had evolved into a bitter dispute over the right to vote and the security of ballots.

The Democratic Party of the State has described Kemp's accusation of "reckless and unethical ploy" and baderted that he was using the FBI to support "false accusations".

According to interviews conducted by the Associated Press and records published by the Democratic Party of Georgia, the saga was quickly developed in the days leading up to Kemp's statement.

A lawyer who represents election safety advocates has already sued Kemp for his performance at work, said a citizen on Friday alerting him to a suspected major flaw in the voters' database, used to register voters in mid-session, Tuesday.

The lawyer, David Cross, warned the FBI and Kemp's lawyer Saturday morning. But the citizen had separately informed the Democratic Party of Georgia, whose voter protection officer had then sent an e-mail to two security officers.

"If this report is accurate, it is a huge vulnerability," wrote the manager, Sara Tindall Ghazal. Party officials provided the AP with email, the names of its addressees redacted.

Neither Cross nor the State Party have become public.

But online media journalists WhoWhatWhy got a copy of Ghazal's e-mail and the one that officials from the Democratic Party received from the citizen who discovered the rift, Richard Wright.

They published an article on Sunday when Kemp's office released the statement accusing Democrats of attempted hacking. "Although we can not comment on the details of an ongoing investigation, I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is currently under investigation for possible cybercrime," Candice said. Broce, who works for Kemp.

Rebecca DeHart, executive director of the Democratic Party, said that no one from Kemp's office had informed the Democratic Party or asked about the correspondence before the publication of its public inquiry. DeHart called this a "political coup" to hide the weaknesses of a system that Kemp operates.

The story of WhoWhatWhy stated that five security experts had reviewed Wright's complaint and independently confirmed that the database was vulnerable to piracy.

Matthew Bernhard, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, told the AP that anyone with access to the personal information of a particular voter could change that voter's file in the system.

Another IT security professional who has examined vulnerability – without attempting to explore it for fear of prosecution – is Kris Constable of PrivaSecTech in Vancouver, Canada. "Anyone with security skills would have detected this problem," he said, "so (the system) has clearly never been audited by any computer security professional."

The FBI refused to comment on the case. A representative of the US Department of Homeland Security confirmed that the agency had been informed, but Georgian officials were referred for further details.

Cross, the lawyer who said he alerted the FBI, said Wright did not want to speak in public. Cross described Wright as a businessman with "some software experience".

The Coalition for Good Governance, a plaintiff in the lawsuit on the integrity of the vote against Kemp, issued a statement denouncing the outsourcing of the voter registration database and the electronic system of registering the poll book with PCC Technologies.

"There are always immediate steps that Secretary Kemp and the state election council can take to alleviate some, but not all, of Tuesday's vote risks," the group said.

Efforts to join the CCP to the comments were unsuccessful.

The drama was played one day as Kemp campaigned alongside President Donald Trump in Macon. Trump made no mention of the issue at the rally and earlier, while he was leaving the White House for Georgia, said he knew nothing about it.

The pointed finger is the last turning point of a campaign whose last weeks have been dominated by accusations of voter suppression and counter-accusations of attempted voter fraud.

Abrams, who would be the first black female governor of the country, called Kemp "the architect of the crackdown on voters" and claimed that he had used his current post to make it more difficult for some voters to vote. Kemp states that it complies with federal and federal laws and that it is about Abrams and its affiliated voting rights groups trying to help people, including non-citizens, to vote illegally.

The atmosphere has left supporters and advocates of good government worrying about the possibility that the losing party will not accept Tuesday's results as legitimate.

The charge is not Kemp's first to accuse foreigners of wanting to enter his office. Immediately following the 2016 general election, Kemp stated that DHS had been attempting to hack his office network, a charge dismissed in mid-2017 by the DHS Inspector General as unfounded.

Before even running for governor, Kemp was criticized for his electoral system.

The centrally managed Georgian electoral system does not have a verifiable paper trail that can be audited in case of a problem. The state is one of only five countries in the world to continue relying exclusively on old electronic voting machines that computer scientists have long criticized for their indignity, because they are easily hacked and leave no trace in writing.

In 2015, Kemp's office inadvertently issued social security numbers and other identifying information of millions of Georgia voters. His office blamed a clerical error.

His office once again made headlines last year after security experts revealed a gaping loophole that had only been repaired six months after it was first reported to the electoral authorities. Personal data was unveiled again to Georgian voters – 6.7 million at the time – as well as pbadwords used by county officials to access the files.

Kemp's office imputed this violation to Kennesaw State University, which operated the system on behalf of Kemp.

In the Integrity of the Vote case, last month a federal judge agreed with the complainant's arguments that Kemp had been negligent in his management of the electoral system, which violated the constitutional rights of voters because of his its lack of verifiability and reliability.

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Associate press editors Michael Balsamo, Colleen Long and Jill Colvin in Washington and Ben Nadler in Atlanta contributed to this report.