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ATLANTA (AP) – Georgia's online voters database has turned into a last-minute curve curve in one of the governor's most popular races, with the Republican candidate Brian Kemp making an allegation of hacking against the Democrats, while a report revealed a gaping vulnerability in a system that Kemp controls as a secretary of state.
Kemp's office did not detail any damaging acts by the Democrats and provided no evidence of Sunday's unusual action, which means that the state's election official has 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 state's Democratic Party has described Kemp's accusation as "reckless and unethical ploy" and said he used the FBI to support "false accusations".
Kemp's actions relate to "a Republic banana" and constitute "perhaps the most outrageous example of partisanship in the electoral administration in the modern era," wrote Richard Hasen, Electoral Law Expert, Slate.
According to interviews conducted by the Associated Press and archives published by the Democratic Party of Georgia, the saga grew rapidly in the days leading up to Kemp's statement.
A lawyer who represents election safety advocates has sued Kemp for his performance at work, a citizen warned Friday of a major flaw in the voter database used for registration. voters at the mid-term.
The lawyer, David Cross, informed 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 AP with e-mail, 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," said Candice Broce. , who works for Kemp.
Rebecca DeHart, executive director of the state's Democratic Party, said no one in Kemp's office had informed the Democratic Party or asked any questions about the correspondence before the public inquiry was released. DeHart called this a "political coup" to hide the weaknesses of a system operated by Kemp.
WhoWhatWhy's story says that five security experts have reviewed Wright's complaint and have independently confirmed that the database is vulnerable to piracy.
Matthew Bernhard, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, told the AP that anyone with access to an elector's personal information 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, "thus (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 knowledge of software".
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 still immediate steps that Secretary Kemp and the state election council can take to mitigate some of the risks associated with Tuesday's vote," 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, as he was leaving the White House for Georgia, said he did not know anything 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 an architect of the electoral crackdown and said he had used his current position to make it more difficult for some voters to vote. Kemp says it follows federal and federal laws and that it is about Abrams and its affiliated voting rights groups trying to help people, including non-citizens, vote illegally .
The atmosphere has left supporters and supporters of the good government worried 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 said that DHS had been attempting to hack his office's 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 verified in the event of a problem. The state is one of only five countries to rely 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 released social security numbers and other information that could identify millions of voters in Georgia. His office blamed a clerical error.
His office hit the headlines again last year after security experts revealed a gaping loophole that was only 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 were the passwords 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, a federal judge upheld the Complainant's arguments last month that Kemp had been abandoned in his management of the electoral system, which would violate the constitutional rights of voters because of his lack of verifiability and reliability.
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