Georgia website that lets people cancel voter registrations briefly displayed personal data

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia election officials are encouraging people to use a state website to cancel voter registrations when someone moves out of state or dies, a nod to Republican concerns that there are invalid registrations on the rolls.

But Monday’s rollout of the site by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was marred by a glitch that allowed people to access a voter’s date of birth, driver’s license number and last four numbers of a Social Security number. That’s the same information needed to verify a person’s identity and allow a registration to be canceled.

The problem, which Raffensperger spokesperson Mike Hassinger said lasted less than an hour and has now been fixed, underscored Democratic concerns that the site could allow outsiders to unjustifiably cancel voter registrations.

“If someone knows my birthdate, you could get in and pull up my information and change my registration,” state Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, a Stone Mountain Democrat, said Tuesday. Democratic staff showed The Associated Press a copy of a document with Butler’s information that they said was produced by the system.

It’s another skirmish over how aggressively states should purge invalid registrations from their rolls. Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over the issue in Georgia for years, but the issue has acquired new urgency, driven by a wide-ranging national effort coordinated by Donald Trump allies to take names from rolls. Activists fueled by Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen argue that existing state cleanup efforts are woefully inadequate and that inaccuracies invite fraud. Few cases of improper out-of-state voting have been proved in Georgia or nationwide.