Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office is accused of releasing Social Security numbers and other private information of more than 6 million Georgians to the media, political organizations and other institutions.
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“I am out at my daughter’s shooting competition”, the Libertarian Party’s Doug Craig said in a text when asked if he would return the file. What remains unclear at this point is whether any of the recipients uploaded the data into larger voter-information systems they maintain, and what kind of exposure there could be from those larger databases. I am confident that our voters’ personal information has not been compromised.
“I take full responsibility for this mistake and have taken immediate action to resolve it. The employee at fault has been fired, and I have put in place additional safeguards effective immediately to ensure this situation does not happen again”.
He says only one employee will be able to download voter data from a secure site. Kemp also failed “to provide the required statutory notice of the breaches of security that occurred after his office released voters’ personal identifying information”, the lawsuit claims.
As a standard practice, these twelve groups, comprised of Georgia’s news media and political parties, receive a computer disk with an updated list of all of Georgia’s registered voters every month. This information is available to them per existing Georgia law. We also need to know whether those physical discs were the only means by which voter data were distributed in October – a month before local elections, it’s possible the regular monthly recipients weren’t alone in getting voter data at that time – and whether there’s anything in the procedures that limited the supposed clerical error to gathering data for those discs.
The Secretary of State’s Office released a statement responding to the lawsuit.
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Kemp in a statement says the personal information was put in the wrong file.
