Georgia is actually making it HARDER to vote! They’ve spent taxpayer money to develop a website — not to register to vote or to get an absentee ballot — but to REQUEST THE CANCELLATION OF VOTER REGISTRATION OF OTHER PEOPLE!
The Georgia Secretary of State says it’s intended for people moving out of state or who have a deceased family member. But in the last few years, Georgia has had hundreds of thousands of challenges of voter registrations by right-wing groups that didn’t even know the people involved, and most of those challenges were groundless and eventually denied.
When it launched on Monday, it 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.” Apparently the glitch only lasted an our or so, but it underscores 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.
This kind of website isn’t actually needed and is clearly to make it even easier for extremists to challenge the voter registrations of anyone they don’t want on the rolls. The original language on the website attested to that, but was later changed.
Not only is there this context of right-wing challenges of voter registrations of so many legitimate voters, but there have been laws passed in Georgia that make it HARDER to vote. Example: requiring a “wet-ink signature” for people to be able to vote, but setting up this online portal to allow anyone to try to remove voter registrations. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t someone asking to remove someone have to sign a piece of paper, perhaps under the penalty of perjury? Making it easy to ask for the removal of voter registrations is simple disenfranchisement.
Source: https://youtu.be/MK4b-meIGPU
