(CNN) With the clock winding down before Tuesday's vote, Georgia's chief elections officer, who is also running for governor, turned a report of an alleged vulnerability in the election system he oversees into a political weapon in a race he is hoping to win.

Republican Brian Kemp on Monday stood by his decision to level claims of attempted hacking at Democrats , turning their objections -- and the concerns of nonpartisan civil rights groups -- into an election eve selling point.

"I'm not worried about how it looks. I'm doing my job," he said during a campaign stop in DeKalb County that he had been stuck with two bad options. "This is how we would handle any investigation when something like this comes up. Because I can assure you if I hadn't done anything and the story came out that something was going on, you'd be going 'Why didn't you act?'"

Kemp's decision to directly accuse the opposing party of wrongdoing while running for the state's highest office has further inflamed deep-seated worries over voting rights in Georgia at the height of a historic campaign by his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, to become the country's black female governor. Amid the furor over the purported hacking, Kemp announced Monday that the state had not only broken its 2014 record, but has set a new, all-time record for early voting in a midterm election.

"The normal course of action would be that you investigate the vulnerability, fix it and then reassure the public. They seem to be doing it backwards," Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech professor and one of the experts contacted by Georgia Democrats, told CNN on Monday. "Rather than addressing the substance of the vulnerability they're assuming everything is fine and attacking the messenger."

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