Last July, Secretary of State Lawerence "Boss" Denney took umbrage at the notion that he required prodding from anyone - much less the Democratic Party - to protect the privacy of Idaho's voters.
At the time, Denney and many of his colleagues across the country were resisting President Donald Trump's Advisory Commission on Election Integrity's request for voter information. Trump formed his commission to vindicate his absurd assertion that voter fraud explained his 2.9 million deficit in the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
Mind you, Trump's commission was after not simply the kind of stuff easily available under the state's public records law - such as who voted, where they lived and their party affiliation.
When the commission's vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, asked for confidential data - a voter's date of birth, perhaps his driver's license number and the last four digits of his Social Security number - Denney rightly refused.
That didn't prevent Democratic Party Chairman Bert Marley from seeking a court order to stop Denney. But what got Denney's goat was Marley taking an undeserved victory lap.
"Chairman Marley - you negotiated for no such thing, and you did nothing to protect the privacy of Idahoans," Denney wrote. "That privacy was already well protected, and I take significant offense to the fact that you would insinuate otherwise. What you did do, however, was file an absolutely unfounded and frivolous lawsuit, (that you eventually dismissed) playing and preying upon public fear, and compounding the problem through misinformation."
Well, not exactly.
As the Idaho Statesman's Cynthia Sewell reported, while Denney was getting all indignant at Marley, he had been funneling precisely that kind of information to Kobach - via another organization the Kansas secretary of state oversees, the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program.
Under an agreement inked by Denney's predecessor, Ben Ysursa, in 2013, Denney's office has forwarded voter information - including birth dates and Social Security information - for the past four years.
It's supposed to clean up voter fraud by finding people who are registered in multiple jurisdictions. But watchdog groups have found plenty of problems.
For instance, legitimate voters have been purged from voting lists - including more than 750 people in Ada County in 2014.
Then there is the issue of cybersecurity - if you want to call it that. As Sewell noted, ProPublica last month disclosed that Crosscheck's data gets uploaded to an unencrypted FTP service - rather than a standard encrypted SFTP. The difference, technologist Joe Hall told ProPublica, is between a postcard and a "letter sealed in an envelope and located in a vault."
Voting data from some 32 states stored in one unencrypted site almost sounds like an open invitation to a Kremlin operative looking to hack an election.
Or for that matter, consider the thoughts roaming through the mind of an identity thief as he considers how the Idaho Statesman and other groups easily obtained Crosscheck's address and unredacted login information through a public records request.
But all of this seems to have come as a surprise to Denney.
He apparently slept through the 2016 hacking of Idaho Fish and Game's online licensing system, this year's Equifax security breach or the fact that four of his counterparts - including a Democratic secretary of state from Pennsylvania as well as Republicans holding that office in Florida, Oregon and Washington - pulled the plug on Crosscheck.
After reading his morning newspaper, however, Denney has conceded the problem. He is reevaluating Crosscheck.
"I thought the process was very secure. I had no idea maybe it wasn't," he said. "I would just say that it appears it has been very sloppy."
So the man who assured Idahoans he would not divulge their personal information has done exactly that.
Is Denney clueless? Or does he believe we are? - M.T.
