Brian Kemp is currently being dragged for posting the personal information of nearly 300,000 voters to his office’s website.
Kemp, who is now declaring himself the winner of Georgia’s gubernatorial race, has already taken heat for his several blatant attempts to suppress voters ahead of and up through Election Day. Now he’s being associated with the posting of thousands of absentee voters’ personal information.
I wanted to write that Brian Kemp is an ethically dubious politician who has veered even farther into the planes of ineptitude with the release of these names and addresses. But that would be unfair—apparently, this is a practice that can be traced back as far as 2013, ostensibly in place for voters to confirm that their vote was properly received and processed, etc.
Instead, I’ll write that Brian Kemp is an ethically dubious politician who has veered even farther into the planes of ineptitude by continuing a lazy practice of allowing the public posting of the names and addresses of these voters instead of databasing them in a secure way that would allow them to monitor and regulate how and when they are accessed.
Experts are rightfully pointing out that, while legal, the way the records were shared could cause huge security issues. In addition to names and addresses, voters’ status as elderly or disabled was also marked—so if there were a potential robber, for example, looking to start knocking off little old ladies’ houses, he’d have a whole database at his fingertips.
But I’m not even going to lie to you: The sheer silliness of posting records this way—thousands of records—is what’s really bothering me. It’s the “reply all with no bcc” of public recordkeeping. He probably didn’t press “upload” on the document, but I’m getting some real Lumberghian vibes from dude at this point. “Yeeeah ... I’m gonna need you to go ahead and accuse the Democrats of voter fraud today ...”
Look, I get that Kemp is pretty busy right now, what with the whole gubernatorial race and Stacey Abrams grilling his ass about these votes. If only he had some reason or recourse to not even have shit to do with the voting in the first pla—
Oh. Oh wait.
Kemp went way out of his way to continue to oversee voting despite a clear conflict of interest. Maybe, if he’d taken a step back from his post instead of doubling down to try and suppress voters, he might not be dealing with yet another snafu.
Shucks. Well, sucks to suck.