(SRN NEWS/REUTERS/97.5 GLORY FM) – The Georgia secretary of state’s (SOS) office said on Wednesday it had fended off a cyberattack aimed at crashing the website the state’s voters use to request absentee ballots. In another development Wednesday, the office said that an audit of Georgia’s voter registration rolls shows that out of about 8 million registered, only 20 are non-citizens.
No further information was provided on the attempted cyberattack. There was no disruption to voters’ ability to request ballots, CNN reported.
“It slowed our systems down for a little bit, but it never stopped our systems from working,” Gabe Sterling, an official in Georgia’s secretary of state’s office, which oversees elections in the battleground state, told CNN.
As for the audit of registered voters, Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger said the 20 people who were on voter rolls who are not U.S. citizens were registered in Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Clayton, Henry and Bibb counties. But there was no evidence that any of them had ever voted.
“Utilizing records from county courts, the state department of driver services, the citizenship and immigration services, we were able to conclusively find 20 non-citizens who are on the voter rolls,” Raffensperger said at a news conference. And, he said he wants them charged and held accountable.
Raffensberger is also promising yearly audits of registered voters in the state.