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Georgia's Secretary of State Brian Kemp Doxes Thousands of Absentee Voters
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Georgia's secretary of state and candidate for state governor in the midterm election, Brian Kemp, has taken the unusual, if not unprecedented step of posting the personal details of 291,164 absentee voters online for anyone to download. Kemp's office posted an Excel file on its website within hours of the results of the general election, exposing the names and addresses of state residents who mailed in an absentee ballot -- including their reason why, such as if a person is "disabled" or "elderly."
The file, according to the web page, allows Georgia residents to "check the status of your mail-in absentee ballot." Millions of Americans across the country mail in their completed ballots ahead of election day, particularly if getting to a polling place is difficult -- such as if a person is disabled, elderly or traveling. When reached, Georgia secretary of state's press secretary Candice Broce told TechCrunch that all of the data "is clearly designated as public information under state law," and denied that the data was "confidential or sensitive." "State law requires the public availability of voter lists, including names and address of registered voters," she said in an email. "While the data may already be public, it is not publicly available in aggregate like this," said security expert Jake Williams, founder of Rendition Infosec, who lives in Georgia. Williams took issue with the reasons that the state gave for each absentee ballot, saying it "could be used by criminals to target currently unoccupied properties." "Releasing this data in aggregate could be seen as suppressing future absentee voters in Georgia who do not want their information released in this manner," he said.
The file, according to the web page, allows Georgia residents to "check the status of your mail-in absentee ballot." Millions of Americans across the country mail in their completed ballots ahead of election day, particularly if getting to a polling place is difficult -- such as if a person is disabled, elderly or traveling. When reached, Georgia secretary of state's press secretary Candice Broce told TechCrunch that all of the data "is clearly designated as public information under state law," and denied that the data was "confidential or sensitive." "State law requires the public availability of voter lists, including names and address of registered voters," she said in an email. "While the data may already be public, it is not publicly available in aggregate like this," said security expert Jake Williams, founder of Rendition Infosec, who lives in Georgia. Williams took issue with the reasons that the state gave for each absentee ballot, saying it "could be used by criminals to target currently unoccupied properties." "Releasing this data in aggregate could be seen as suppressing future absentee voters in Georgia who do not want their information released in this manner," he said.
And we know that NYC is a bastion of the Republican Party!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
ISTM that security expert Jake Williams is relying on security by obscurity.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Public information being made public isn't an "attack".
Ken
Voter Registration information is public information, not private.
Apparently GA state law obligates the Secretary of State to make absentee ballot information available, if that's the case, the law should probably better specify the manner to make that information available, if that's not the case then he broke the law.
When reached, Georgia secretary of state's press secretary Candice Broce told TechCrunch that all of the data "is clearly designated as public information under state law," and denied that the data was "confidential or sensitive." "State law requires the public availability of voter lists, including names and address of registered voters," she said in an email.
Ken
The problem is that since he is actually on the ballots in question, he has an intrinsic conflict of interest. He absolutely should have reused himself. Especially since the margin in that race is less than 1%.
You don't understand the rules. Dirty tricks are ok if your side is doing them, they're only wrong if the other side uses them. Being a hypocrite is a prerequisite for becoming a politician (and how I wish this was only a joke).
Voting histories absolutely are kept. You can view them online. Not who you voted for but the fact that you voted. I call foul play because he removed people from the voter rolls in an election that he himself was competing in. If you cannot see the inherent conflict of interest in that then you are a fool.
Trump won because of an outdated and racist electoral college system, not because of independents.
Well, Democrats haven't had a utter loony in office in a very long time, and Democrats haven't had to hold their nose while being asked to kiss their president's ass. Somehow the very same Republicans who publicly criticized Trump before he was elected managed to turn around and kowtow to him. Trump publicly insulted Ted Cruz's wife, and yet Cruz still turned around and praised Trump after the election.
Seriously, I miss the Republican Party, because what we have today no longer resembles it.
Sure it is. Just like parking next to a strip club, parking at a STD testing center, and listing everything you buy in a store on a website is all public information. Someone can watch the cashier scan everything you buy and write up a list and post it. It's all public info. Your address and home phone are public info, same as what you paid for your house or your rent. All those things have proper uses. Combining everything together and telling people 'hey look at this' completely changes the intent of the data.
I understand that "they all do it!!!1!one!" is a popular sentiment with a lot of people, but why is it that whenever you hear of a politician or public administrator disenfranchising or otherwise outright fucking voters over it's virtually always a republican?
I presume that it's a cultural problem, in that many people with the personality type that favors "conservative values" don't see a problem with fighting dirty. To those people, the ends really justify the means. Besides, voter disenfranchisement usually benefits republicans, so that compounds the problem.
I have posting about things like this for many years now. Back "in the day", "public" information didn't mean posted, in mass, in real-time or short-time, in a machine-readable format, with a zero barrier of entry, online. No such things existed. This type of thing happens all the time now and is a serious erosion of privacy, made possible by increased data collection, data standardization, computers, and the Internet.
Even just 50 years ago, the concept was one of if someone wanted to obtain such information, they would have to really want/need it and commit themselves to it.... they would have to perhaps get in a vehicle, travel to some records place or courthouse, fill out forms, and wait a long time to then retrieve information that would be in non-machine format (paper with no OCR), and often pay some type of processing and location and duplication fees. All this helped to keep a check on abuse.
There are so many ways this can go wrong. Driving is a public activity, for example. Governments are now starting to track license plate data with cameras. (It is bad enough to collect such information in the first place, but that is a different topic). That information might be publicly available.... but what does it mean if all that data were posted on-line, in short-order, like this? Court records are "public" and we see how that is a problem. Housing records, gun registrations or licensing, business licensing, professional licensing, marriage records, political party affiliation, school registrations; the list goes on and on. Now take all these and store them "forever" and make them easy to get, free, and computer-readable and then allow people and businesses to download them en-mass and start linking everything together. Scary.
So while transparency can often be a good thing for society, we might have to re-examine what it means for information to be "publicly available" like this.
Its a list of all places to rob, and you even get to know how elderly and vulnerable they are.
The person who posted this list is a moron.
That would be a great comparison except it never happened. Back then it wasn't called "fake news" though. It was called "fair and balanced" reporting.
Of course this hasn't stopped the Republicans from doing things that at the very least inconvenience a lot of voters to combat this non-existant problem.
Your one example doesn't support your claim of "hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters" being wiped from the voter registration lists.
Being offered a provisional ballot is not being "denied to vote" - AFAIK the 92 year-old grandma was offered a provisional ballot
Ken
So supply the link
Is that really how you think arguments work? If you can find a single counter-example, it disproves the assertion that side A does something much more than side B?
Why would you think that? Are you stupid? Surely no-one can be that stupid.
I don't know maybe you need to ask that idiot poster who said "There are no cases" three times when there's plenty of cases and it's trivially easy to find them.
Whatabutt that guy in Chicago a hundred years ago, huh? Whatabutt that? Dems did it once!
It's surprising how often conservative arguments against Democrats point to actions by Democrats from 100 years ago, when the Democrats were the conservative party, and Republicans the progressive party.
Your assertion is trivially refuted by the relentless repetition of Hillary's email problem in the press because they needed a "both sides are bad" "fair and balanced" response so they could cover Trump's constant bullshit. The media also covered the accusations and resignation of Franken. The fact that they're not covering your priest's sermon about how Democrats are all literally possessed by the devil doesn't mean they're keeping the real news silent.
You do know that Veritas puts out the unedited videos? Unlike CNN/MSNBC/etc
You're right, the Democrats aren't really all that progressive. Most prominent Democrats (Obama definitely, but also many others) are moderately conservative. I think you could make a good case that in many ways the Democrats are closer to classical conservatism than the Republicans, who seem to have embraced dramatic change without consideration for consequences, though in a direction that's regressive rather than progressive.
And putting everyone at each other's throats is indeed not progressive. It's sadly working very well for regressives.
The person who posted this list is a moron.
No, the person who posted this has an agenda. A very specific agenda. Discourage absentee / mail in ballots. They're harder to forge, easier to check, and can't be modified with a keystroke en masse the way electronic votes can. In other words, it's harder to steal an election (particularly a close election) with paper mail-in ballots than it is with a USB stick full of (potentially doctored) voting data. And many more absentee voters typically vote for one party over the other (hint: not the party that owns Kemp)
Does this feel like the Last and Final "Free and Fair" American Election to anyone else (even for very loose definitions of "Free and Fair")?
It's because their ideas aren't popular. Seriuosly, they're not. 90% of Americans support legal protections for pre-existing conditions. 70% of Americans support Medicare for all (52% of _Republicans_). 70% of Americans are pro-choice. And I've never met anyone but a member of the GOP inner circle who favors the kind of trickle down economics they popularized in Kansas (and apparently neither has Kansas, they just kicked Scott Walker to the Curb).
Americans are surprisingly left wing when you poll them. Which makes sense. The left wing tends to focus on worker's rights and quality of life, and most Americans are workers. We're not a nation of well to do aristocrats. There's not enough serfs to go around for that.
If the GOP ever stops cheating they'll stop winning.
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they have a laser like focus on their goal. And there is only one: shift as much money to themselves and their donors. Always, always, always follow the money.
The Dems will sometimes sell you out. Sometimes they won't. Even the worst (Pelosi & Schumer mostly) are happy as long as they get reelected and have pangs of conscience. Some of them (the Bernicrats) even have a real desire to make the world better. There's none of that with the GOP. And it makes them _strong_. When you focus on one and only one goal you can move mountains.
Watch what the GOP does. What it's always done. Don't listen to their rhetoric. Do not, under any circumstances, watch a Trump rally. Those are there to make you _feel_. You need to think. Watch how they vote.
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I live in the 6th district of Georgia. I have no way of verifying the claims you made against Abrams and you're making some damning claims with no evidence. But one this is clear; Kemp should have handed off oversight of the elections to a neutral party. This is simple and obvious ethics, which it seems Kemp lacks. Now that the race is so very close, Kemps decision to maintain control over the elections is clearly a horrendous conflict of interest. If this were election overseas, we'd call it a sham election.