Top Georgia Official Says State Fended Off Election-Related Cyberattack

The apparent attack targeted the battleground state’s absentee ballot portal.

Voters cast ballots in Georgia's primary election at a polling location in Atlanta, Ga., on May 21, 2024. Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

Georgia officials thwarted an attempt to flood the state’s absentee voter portal in an apparent bid to crash the site, the secretary of state’s office said on the evening of Oct. 23.

The attack was limited to the part of the state’s website that voters use to request an absentee ballot. Users may have experienced a brief slowdown, but the site never crashed and no data was compromised, said Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.