Georgia's Brian Kemp Announces Hacking Election Charge Against Democrats: NPR

Days before elections, Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is running a close-fought campaign for governor, says Democrats are under investigation for hacking the state's election system.

A spokesman for Kemp – who is in a neck-and-neck race with Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams – provided no evidence for the accusation made on Sunday, that also came just as reports that the state election system , is open to glaring vulnerabilities.

"While we can not comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation, I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cybercrimes," Candice Broce, who works for Kemp, said, according to The Associated Press.

Democrats responded to the announcement, calling it "a reckless and unethical ploy."

"He is trying to rile up his base by misleading voters yet again," Abrams told The Atlanta Journal Constitution. "The Democrats did nothing wrong."

Citing a potential conflict of interest, Democrats, including former President Jimmy Carter, have been unsuccessfully appealed to the Kemp to step aside as secretary of state after the election.

Edgardo Cortés, Virginia's former elections commissioner who is now an election security adviser for the Brennan Center for Justice, told the AJC that Sunday's announcement was "bizarre" and said the timing of it is "problematic."

"It all just sounds very strange," Cortes said. "What did you find in Virginia?" In Virginia, we would never have done something because I thought it would be a lot of concern among voters.

On Saturday, a federal judge ruled that the state must relax voting restrictions that could prevent more than 3,000 people

As NPR's Shannon Van Sant reported over the weekend, Judge Eleanor District US District Judge Eleanor Ross, with whom the state's "exact match" law, which can be used to disallow voting for such things as missing hyphens, accent marks and middle initials , was overly restrictive.

In her ruling, Ross noted that such restrictions were likely to fall most heavily on minorities.

A report by The Associated Press said that under the "exact match" law, Kemp had more than 50,000 votes cast registrations by mostly black voters. The AP reported that through a Kemp calls process "vote roll maintenance," his office has "canceled over 1.4 million votes registrations since 2012" and that "nearly 670,000 registrations were canceled in 2017 alone."