Forsaking transparency for the illusion of privacy

The formidable forces of government transparency and individual privacy are ready to rumble.

The battleground this time is under the state Capitol dome in Hartford and the outcome stands to affect nearly every adult in Connecticut.

On the one side, we have House Bill 5507. (Stick with me; this isn’t dry. I’m mentioning the bill number so you can track it — and because journalists like precise details.) It’s a bipartisan bill, which usually is a good thing.

State Rep. Fred Camillo, a Republican from Greenwich, and state Rep. Brenda Kupchick, a Democrat from Fairfield, introduced it; co-sponsors are Republican state Rep. Terrie Wood, of Darien; Democratic state Reps. Cristin McCarthy Vahey, of Fairfield, and Josh Elliott, of Hamden. The bill is before the Joint Committee on Government Administration and Elections.

Its purpose is to “limit disclosure of certain voter registration data to candidates, candidate committees and political committees only and for noncommercial purposes only, and to require that newly admitted electors be notified of such disclosure.”

The bill would block out the registered voter’s birth date and year from registration lists; Social Security and driver’s license numbers already are withheld.

Also, it would limit sale of the lists to only candidates or political committees or parties. I was as surprised as you might be to learn that Connecticut sells its voter registration list — and for a paltry $300. But more about that in minute; right now let’s talk about privacy.

The desire to keep personal information private is driving the move. CTVoterPrivacy.org takes credit for getting the bill sponsored and urges voters to contact GAE Committee members and tell them “Connecticut voters do not want their personal data sold or made public.”

The problem — the rumble — is that for the sake of election integrity this information must remain public, and accessible.

In this century, complete privacy is a fallacy. People readily give up their information and preferences all the time, knowingly or not.

“There are a number of ways people put their private information in jeopardy through social media,” Michael Savino, president of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information, told me in a phone call. “If you think this bill is going to protect your data, you’re mistaken.”

Dana Whalen, former news director of WTICAM1080, told an illuminating anecdote at the January meeting of the CCFOI, which I attended.

A guy was outraged that a pornographic ad popped up while he was reading Colin McEnroe’s column online. (A Hartford Courant columnist at the time, McEnroe now writes for Hearst Connecticut newspapers.) How could he let that happen? Well, turns out pop-ups are individualized through recent sites visited by the reader!

It’s a trade-off. One of my favorite editorial cartoons from 2018 depicts Facebook as a bandit saying “Gimme me your personal data!” and the victim replies “OK ... as long as I can post funny cat videos.”

Privacy withered in the internet age. And there’s no going back.

“Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases,” Oliver Sacks wrote in an essay for the Feb. 11 issue of The New Yorker. “There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in the world devoted to non-stop use of social media.”

This is not to say that concerns over identity theft are unfounded. But removing public information is not the answer.

A better approach was proposed by Secretary of the State Denise Merrill last week — to create a cybersecurity position for the “technical review, testing or research associated with the use of voting systems” and development of standards to “protect the integrity of the voting process.”

Freedom of Information advocates work year after year to keep information public for the sake of government transparency. This protects, rather than harms.

“Birth dates are a key component of voter information that protects against voter fraud,” Colleen Murphy, executive director of the state Freedom of Information Commission, said in reply to my questions. “Dates of birth are key to verifying whether people are eligible to vote.”

Limiting who can obtain voter registration lists also is counter to government oversight.

“The lists are valuable tools for the public (and journalists) to provide a check on the elections officials who are responsible for ensuring voter lists are accurate, up-to-date,” Murphy said. Many recent elections, such as the governor’s race in Georgia, “raised grave concerns about how decisions were made regarding who was eligible to vote, which names were removed from the voter list, etc.”

In Connecticut, a 2014 investigation by Connecticut Post journalists into the voting records of then-state Rep. Christina Ayala led to the state attorney’s office charging her with election fraud. Savino said that wouldn’t have happened without access to voting records. More recently, instances of voters getting the wrong ballots have arisen.

To limit voter registration lists to only political purposes blindfolds transparency.

Initially, I thought charging $300 for the list was crass. But the FOI experts changed my mind.

“The price is perhaps negotiable,” Murphy said, but “generally, if you believe that information is public, it ought to be available at a price that is reasonable (not excessively high).”

Last year, Maine was charging $30,000 for a copy of their voters list; Alabama charged by name, Merrill has said. There is no uniformity to how states handle the information — nine restricted lists to only political or election use; at least 11 blocked the lists from the general public.

Not Connecticut. We’ve been a leader in Freedom of Information since the Watergate era. For Democracy’s sake, we should stay that way.