In late July, several people on social media claimed Georgia launched a new web portal that makes it easy for anyone in the state to cancel other people’s voter registration months ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
“Georgia just published a website where you can cancel other people’s voter registrations online,” an X post with over 1.3 million views said. Many people replied to the post expressing disbelief and confusion over the alleged portal.
THE QUESTION
Did Georgia launch a voter registration cancellation web portal?
THE SOURCES
THE ANSWER
Yes, Georgia launched a voter registration cancellation web portal. Georgia’s secretary of state says the portal is intended to keep voter rolls up-to-date, while critics worry bad actors could cancel other people’s registrations without their consent.
WHAT WE FOUND
Georgia election officials launched a web portal on July 29 that allows people in the state to cancel their voter registration online by entering some personal identifying information, including their name, birthdate, county of registration, driver’s license number or a partial Social Security number.
Georgia’s secretary of state says the portal is intended to keep voter rolls up-to-date by digitizing the process people go through to cancel their own registration after moving out of state.
But many Georgia Democrats have raised concerns about the portal, arguing the system makes it too easy for anyone with access to an individual’s personal information to be able to cancel that person’s voter registration without their consent. A glitch, which has since been resolved, already exposed voter information that could be used to cancel registrations.
Georgia has more than 8 million registered voters, including 900,000 classified as inactive. Inactive voters are people who haven’t participated in an election or had other contact with the state’s election system for the past five years.
Until now, the process for canceling a voter registration typically required mailing or emailing a form to the county where the voter formerly lived.
In a July 29 announcement, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called the new portal “a convenient tool for any voter who wants to secure their voter registration by canceling their old one when they move out of state.”
“It will also help keep Georgia’s voter registration database up-to-date without having to rely on postcards being sent and returned by an increasingly inefficient postal system,” said Raffensperger.
To access the website, the “GA Voter Registration Cancellation Portal” first requires a voter’s first initial, last name, the county in which they’re registered to vote, and a date of birth.
On the next page, the portal asks the person to input a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number into the system, and indicate that they wish to be removed from the list of registered voters. County officials would then get a notification from the state’s computer system and remove the voters from the rolls.
But the rollout of the portal was marred by a glitch that allowed anyone to access a voter’s driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number after entering their name, date of birth and county of registration. With that information, someone could then start over and cancel anyone’s registration without their consent.
In a statement, Georgia Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler said the Senate Democratic Caucus was the first to identify the “massive security flaw” with the portal. The issue, which “is believed to be the result of a scheduled software update,” was resolved within an hour, according to Raffensperger’s office.
“If someone knows my birthdate, you could get in and pull up my information and change my registration,” Butler told the Associated Press on July 30. Democratic staff showed a copy of a document with Butler’s information that they said was produced by the system.
Butler applauded the quick fix by Raffensperger’s office, but she and other Democrats said the problem only underlines that outsiders could use the site to cancel other people’s voter registrations if they have their personal information.
VERIFY partner station WXIA in Atlanta reached out to Raffensperger’s office for further information about whether there are any safeguards in place to protect people against someone canceling their voter registration if they have access to their personal information.
Raffensperger’s office responded to the inquiry, highlighting security tools they said would make the system resistant to misuse by bots or “other inorganic activity.” They also added that the portal creates a trail for identifying “any malicious individuals who would attempt to use the portal to cancel voter registrations without the voters’ knowledge.”
Democrats and Republicans in Georgia have been fighting over how aggressively the state should purge invalid registrations from its voter rolls for years, but the issue has acquired new urgency, driven by a wide-ranging national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to remove 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. But few cases of improper out-of-state voting have been proven in Georgia or nationwide, according to the Associated Press.
“We do voter list maintenance in Georgia every day,” said Raffensperger. “This is one more method that’s convenient for voters and efficient for election officials.”
To check your voter registration status in Georgia, visit the “GA My Voter Page” on the secretary of state website.
VERIFY partner station WXIA and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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