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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.
If it is not "confidential or sensitive", why do I get a 404 now?
Looks like someone changed their mind.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
Any of them can vote with provisional ballots should they choose to vote and find their registration has been invalidated. Cleaning roll will inevitably lead to some legitimate voters being cut because data management isn't perfect. New York City did the same thing and purged almost 120,000 before the last election. It inevitably resulted in many people having to cast provisional ballots. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/a...
You do realize this was an attack specifically against people who did make the effort to vote, right?
And we know that NYC is a bastion of the Republican Party!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Yeah, but nobody's fighting back.
Fighting back against what? Every jurisdiction in the country routinely purges voter roles. Because voter roles end up filled with relocated people, dead people, convicts, etc. It has to be done, and should be done more often. The earlier and more often the better. And it's up to the voter to confirm that they're current. Everywhere in the country, legitimate voters are mailed sample ballots. Didn't get one? Check in. Waited to long? Submit a provisional ballot anyway, as you straighten it out. This comes up every year, all across the country. Purging bad entries from the roles IS FIGHTING BACK. It helps to mitigate fraudulent voting. The people who scream the loudest about the databases being kept current are the ones shilling on behalf of they party with the long history of making the most of dead voters. Which you know. Your theatrical hand-wringing isn't earnest, and your concerns are plainly phony.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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
he won after all. And his party held onto the Senate, paving the way fro Trump to fire Sessions. This is what winning at any cost means.
My question is will the voters keep going along with it. So far it looks like the answer is yes. If that's the case I'm hoping to die before we go full on authoritarian and that my kid gets to move to Canada. I'm not being hyperbolic anymore. This timeline sucks.
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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.
Guess I shouldn't be surprised. Hell isn't big enough for the Republicans.
There are certain principles that underline America. The three that most come to mind are:
1. Everyone get's a say, at least if your a member.
2. The fourth estate, the press, is vital to defending freedom.
3. Underlying 2 is the idea of the importance of truth and people knowing the true state of things.
Republicans regularly try to disenfranchise legitimate citizens right to vote as a way to win more elections. They do it in various ways, though adding road blocks that target more of the people voting against them is the usual.
Trump in particularly has directly declared war on both the fourth estate and truth. He said it today, "You are the enemy of the people", practically inviting anyone to start targeting reporters and the press. He knows exactly what he is doing. He wants to see deaths, or at minimum considers them an acceptable price to pay if it gets him what he wants. There is no other logical explanation. Don't believe me, replay the last few weeks.
By having the people in charge of protecting our country and leading it attack and attempt to destroy these core principles and pillars of our country they have committed actual treason, even if it can't be prosecuted as such, for nothing can so more readily destroy a country than destruction from within. Trump's lies and hate were effective. He avoided what should have been far worse losses by stoking irrational fear with lies and bullshit, and the Senate increase for republicans will be hard to overcome. Some may say the democrats won a victory, but it is America who lost.
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%.
This. He ran for governor while he was Secretary of State -- the person who oversaw the very election he was competing in.
And that's not all. Aside from voter-suppression accusations, there were last-minute accusations and innuendo that the Democrats hacked his election campaign and were "being investigated." How convenient. No time to examine and air the facts.
Georgia, you're on everyone's mind. You can do better than this.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
Except that this isn't actually what happens in practice. There are no cases, for example, of a Democrat candidate who is also personally in charge of the count in their state. There are no cases of Democrat suppression of the vote. REDMAP was a Republican project. Etc.
He also fought in court to keep the paperless voting machines.
https://www.georgiapol.com/2018/01/25/kemp-paper-ballots-tearing-down-georgia/
"Kemp Claims Those who want Paper Ballots are Tearing Down Georgia Institutions"
He blocked HB 641, a law requiring ballot machines with paper audit trails.
When he's been pressed to replace them he "created a commission to study the issue" ! Stall!
And he was the one who had an election server wiped days after the lawsuit alleging voter fraud on the voting machines was filed.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/11/16/georgia-paperless-voting-systems-controversy/
"A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed."
Just after.
You cannot trust paperless voting systems. You cannot simply take blind faith in Kemp's election result that Kemp certifies that Kemp won.
Because as long as he holds power, the voting machines will remain unauditable without a paper trail.
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.
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.
I'm curious how you imagine one can register to vote without providing an address, and once one registers to vote, their address is public record.
Ken
It doesn't always work like that. You can't know who someone will vote for, so voter surpression has to go on statistics. You target demographics that are going to vote one way. There are a few dirty tricks that have been used in the past.
- Misinformation - spread fake government announcements to your target to inform them of a last-minute change to voting location or time, so they miss the vote. Or in a more recent version, inform them they can now vote through their phones by texting a specific number.
- Intimidation - have some scary-looking thugs stand near the polling building, looking for people of the other side and scaring them off with glares and threatening gestures. This is why many places ban wearing any sort of political attire when voting - having a candidate logo on your shirt makes it very easy to identify who you will vote for. You can also do this with voting officials by having them be extra-vigilant when checking credentials (Sorry, there's a scratch on this photo, I can't take this).
- Uneven allocation of resources. Give plenty of polling booths to districts you expect to support your party, and under-allocate resources to districts that will oppose, so voters there have to drive further and queue for hours. This discourages them from voting.
- Selective de-registration - this is one of the accusations against Georgia. They deleted a lot of voters from the rolls at the last minute, and blocked registration for a lot more based on very minor discrepencies with other government records - things like names spelled slightly differently, which disproportionately affect immigrants and children of immigrants, who are more likely to vote Dem.
In a very close election, convincing even just one percent of the other team's voters to give up can make the difference.
On a wider scale, Republicans have been pushing for tighter voter ID requirements for years - claiming that it's about vote fraud, and repeating a claim that millions of illegal immigrants are voting every election, though they've never been able to catch any of them in the act. Voter ID laws can be used to target by income: It's very difficult to get any sort of ID without a fixed address, so instantly excludes the homeless from voting. It also excludes a lot of people who live on reservations, as they generally use post-office boxes rather than addresses. So it's a way to selectively discourage these Democrat-loving demographics from voting.
Expect to see more of this in the coming days. A heavily Republican-leaning 'watchdog' organisation, Project Veritas, did a lot of undercover filming during the election. I wouldn't trust any of it because they have a long history of selectively editing videos - looks like they were manipulating polling booth staff into saying they are happy to let illegal immigrants vote, or editing videos in a way that implies that is what was said. I'm sure it'll be all over right-leaning media soon as the smoking gun that proves Democrats stole the election with illegal voters.
This is the same issue as the "right to forget" that so many decry. Decades ago you had a chance to rehabilit people in case of offense, or in case of incident (debt/accident etc...) have them have a second chance because people had to do an EFFORT to get data or collate it. So de facto we had the possibility to be forgotten. This is going away. Which is why I think the right to be forgotten is good (yes I am an Euro trash which think rehabilitation/second chance is not a dirty word).
The issue you speak about is a general one. Bad situation which were avoidable decades ago because data could not be easily gatherable or collatable are now becoming increasingly possible. I personally think the right that information do not get collated and stay semi private is a greater right than the one of the public think they have to get "informed" about everything and anything.
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visit randi.org
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
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?
Whatabutt that guy in Chicago a hundred years ago, huh? Whatabutt that? Dems did it once!
So supply the link
Because this is a list of absentee voters, which by definition didn't expect to make it to the nearest booth come election day. Including a reason why - so scanning it for people that weren't at home (traveling) should be easy. Doesn't mean EVERYONE at the address is gone, and the information should rapidly get out of date the further from that date we get.
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.
Ballots found after the election, breaking heavily for Franken.
Felons casting illegal votes in MN
Ballots "found" 5 weeks after the election change the results by being just enough in favor of the loser, the Democrat, who by virtue of the found ballots, won the election.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
Rookie mistake there:
King County Council Chairman Larry Phillips was at a Democratic Party office in Seattle on Sunday December 12, reviewing a list of voters whose absentee votes had been rejected due to signature problems, when to his surprise he found his own name listed. Phillips said he was certain he had filled out and signed his ballot correctly, and asked the county election officials to investigate the discrepancy.
If you are going to cheat to make sure the Democrats don't win, at least make sure you don't invalidate Democrat politician's votes. If anyone is likely to check, it's them.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You do know that Veritas puts out the unedited videos? Unlike CNN/MSNBC/etc
Voter rolls aren't just public record, they're published. It's required. This isn't unusual or unprecedented, it's common practice. I don't know why Williams has his panties in a bunch over not having to order a printed copy.
I mean, this came out a couple of days ago:
https://politics.slashdot.org/...
Interestingly, few people thought they were evil. The left-leaning folks here who are getting the vapors didn't seem to show up for that one, presumably because it was also made by left-leaning folks.
Do you have ESP?
Here is a list of countries that require a valid voter ID to cast a vote on election day.
Only ONE party disapproves of measures to make our elections secure. Voter ID is NOT a function of America's "racist past" every country that's not a dictatorship has some form of assuring that the person voting is entitled to. EVERY COUNTRY.
If those that demand no Voter Identification were concerned for the poor, they'd facilitate the acquisition of ID, not seek ways to avoid it. After all, what's the best job you ever had where you didn't need to identify yourself?
NAACP requires photo ID to attend anti-voter-ID protest march
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"Provisional ballots" are a joke. They're rarely even looked at after the election, and if they are each needs to be approved by an election judge (who isn't going to allow a ballot to be counted if the voter wasn't registered, no matter how unfair the reason why they're not registered) before being counted. They're a way to shut people up at the ballot box and nothing more.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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")?
No, but the Secretary of State is responsible for making sure the entire process of voting does count all of the votes, records the votes securely, provides polling places accessible to everyone who wants to exercise their right to vote, etc. Also responsible for investigating any cases where the integrity of the election is questioned, before or after the fact.
Kinda like a judge isn't responsible for deciding guilt or innocence (that would be the jury) but is responsible for running the process the jury works within, and IS expected to self recuse where there may be a conflict of interest that might raise questions in anyone's mind.
I get what you're claiming and there may be some truth to it (but I don't think much) in some respects, but I don't think it does in this case. If there were frequent cases of democrat governors or secretaries of state disenfranchising or in any other way screwing over voters in conservative areas we would surely hear about it.
For one, that would be relatively big news and any reporters breaking such news would raise their profile. For another, there are conservative media outlets, commentators, column writers, etc. They would surely scream from the tops of the mountains about these cases. Except that you never hear about it. This leads me to conclude that this is a lot more common in republican administrations than in democratic administrations.
Voter disenfranchisement seems to flow in one direction only, as far as I can tell.
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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you're comparing two completely unrelated things. One is an app that tells my friends I voted and reminds them to do the same. The other is a massive data dump that aggregates large amount of voter data in a state full of people who have a history of racially tinged terrorism (e.g. the KKK). You're being deliberately misleading. Shame on you.
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Thanks for providing concrete examples, rather than hypotheticals or totally unrelated "what abouts". Your first point about the county split sounds like a case of gerrymandering, which is out of scope of what I was talking about since it's not about individual voter disenfranchisement. I realize that it disenfranchises voters collectively, but it's (unfortunately) an old, bipartisan practice in the US. This is a real "they all do it!" situation.
I was talking about things that either block or discourage individuals from voting, like what is being described in the article at hand. That's the situation that I said some claim "they all do it!" despite most evidence appearing to contradict that.
Regarding the school board situation, I would need to know more before making a judgement. It seems unlikely that they would take away the ability to elect a school board without providing some reason for doing it. Were there misdeeds by the previous schoolboards or in their elections?