Georgia GOP Governor-elect Brian Kemp won in November through no small amount of voter suppression as Secretary of State, but his most vile tactic was accusing Georgia Democrats of "hacking" into the state's voter database the weekend before the election, a move the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found was a smokescreen to allow Kemp to gather a team of security experts and supply them the access they needed to cover his own dirty tracks.
Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor, had a problem. As did Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state.
It was Nov. 3, a Saturday, 72 hours to Election Day. Virtually tied in the polls with Democrat Stacey Abrams, Kemp was in danger of becoming the first Georgia Republican to lose a statewide election since 2006. And, now, a new threat. The secretary of state’s office had left its voter-registration system exposed online, opening Kemp to criticism that he couldn’t secure an election that featured him in the dual roles of candidate and overseer.
But by the next day, Kemp and his aides had devised one solution for both problems, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.
They publicly accused the Democratic Party of Georgia of trying to hack into the voter database in a failed attempt to steal the election. The announcement added last-minute drama to an already contentious campaign. More important, it also pre-empted scrutiny of the secretary of state’s own missteps while initiating a highly unusual criminal investigation into his political rivals.
But no evidence supported the allegations against the Democrats at the time, and none has emerged in the six weeks since, the Journal-Constitution found. It appears unlikely that any crime occurred.
“There was no way a reasonable person would conclude this was an attempted attack,” said Matthew Bernhard, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan who has consulted with plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging Georgia’s use of outdated touch-screen voting machines.
To reconstruct the campaign’s final weekend, the Journal-Constitution interviewed more than 15 people — computer security experts, political operatives, lawyers and others — and reviewed court filings and other public records. That examination suggests Kemp and his aides used his elected office to protect his political campaign from a potentially devastating embarrassment.
Their unsubstantiated claims came at a pivotal moment, as voters were making their final decisions in an election that had attracted intense national attention.
The race seemed to turn on whether rapid demographic changes – coupled with dislike of Kemp’s most prominent supporter, President Donald Trump – would help break the Republicans’ hold on political power in Georgia. Kemp was a typical Georgia Republican standard bearer: conservative, business-oriented, an abortion-rights opponent and a gun-rights advocate. Abrams was different: the first African-American and the first woman nominated for the state’s highest office, an unapologetic progressive appealing to young and minority voters who felt disenfranchised.
Ultimately, Kemp won with 50.2 percent of the nearly 4 million votes cast. In Georgia’s closest race for governor since 1968, any voters swayed by a purported Democratic cyberattack could have tipped the election.
The episode highlighted the inherent conflicts that Kemp straddled throughout this election. He rejected calls to resign as secretary of state or to step away from election-related duties, despite concerns that he could use his elected office to his campaign’s advantage. When he assigned his own staff to investigate his opponents, Democrats say, Kemp proved their point.
“He was doing anything he could do to win,” said Rebecca DeHart, executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia. “It was an extraordinary abuse of power.”
Brian Kemp manipulated the election, and he was able to do it because Brian Kemp was also in charge of counting the votes and determining the eligibility of voters. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution team makes the very convincing case that Kemp stole the election from Abrams, plain and simple.
The accusations of Democratic party meddling in the voter database were 100% false, and it becoming the final major news story in the 72 hours leading up the election is what gave Kemp the win.
Furthermore, it allowed Kemp, gubernatorial candidate, and his security team to go in and clean up the evidence that Kemp, Secretary of State, illegally purged hundreds of thousands of black Democratic voters from the rolls, and the fact that Kemp did everything he could to leave the state's systems vulnerable to attack so that he could blame Democrats in the waning hours of the campaign.
This is a pretty important read, and it raises a number of legal questions about Kemp's status as Governor-elect. I'm hoping Abrams and the state's Democrats choose to take legal action.
We'll see.
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