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Georgia Gives Personal Data of 6 Million Voters To Georgia GunOwner Magazine (ajc.com)

McGruber writes: A class action lawsuit alleges that Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp's office released the personal identifying information of Georgia voters to twelve organizations, "including statewide political parties, news media organizations and Georgia GunOwner Magazine".

According to Kemp, his office shares "voter registration data every month with news media and political parties that have requested it as required by Georgia law. Due to a clerical error where information was put in the wrong file, 12 recipients received a disc that contained personal identifying information that should not have been included."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution independently confirmed the inclusion of the personal data in the October file. The AJC did so by accessing the October data disc, looking up information for an AJC staffer and confirming his Social Security number and driver's license information was included. The AJC has returned its copy of the disc to the state.

2 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why single out a magazine? by Nidi62 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As a Georgian who owns guns, I have never even heard of this magazine nor seen it in any of the several gun stores/ranges I have gone to over the years. And looking at their website, it looks like something a high school student would throw together for a web publishing class. I agree, it does seem odd that it would specifically mention the magazine in the title, but the article itself only names the magazine, with the other groups being vaguely defined as "statewide political parties" and "news media organizations".

    --
    The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
  2. Re:Clearly a massive breach of personal data. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Thanks for the rant. Now for reality...

    Voter records have ALWAYS been publically available. The cost was probably just paying someone in govt the time it takes to gather it and burn it to a disk. Many people have used these records to show dead people voting (Social Security also keeps a list of dead people), or other voter irregularities.

    The difference here is they released SSNs of the voters, along with other "private" information.

    But thanks for the rant on how evil capitalism is when this is a 100% screw up of the government. That's like blaming a mugging victim for daring to carry something valuable to be robbed and saying the only solution is to give the muggers more power to ensure people don't dare carry valuables anymore. You would think anti-freedom people like this would be ridiculed instead of listened to.