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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...
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
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
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!
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?
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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