Agency loses voter records

Sensitive data for 150,000 residents might be at risk

Alan Gathright And Lou Kilzer, Rocky Mountain News

Published June 10, 2006 at midnight

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The Denver Election Commissioner has lost sensitive information for more than 150,000 voters - about 42 percent of those registered in the city - that could be exploited by identity thieves if it fell into the wrong hands.

What has some election commissioners fuming is that the filing cabinet containing the microfilm with voter registrations from 1989-1998 vanished during a February move to a new office building, but top officials say they only learned about it June 1.

And they heard about it from City Councilwoman Judy Montero, who demanded to know why an Internet blog was reporting "that confidential data about Denver voters has been compromised."

"We're taking this very seriously," commission spokesman Alton Dillard said Friday. "We're conducting a full investigation having to do both with trying to locate the information and to find out essentially who knew what when. We will get to the bottom of it."

The missing records could be an identity thief's dream, because they contain voters' names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, signatures and addresses, according to a Friday statement on the commission Web site.

At this point, officials don't know if the voting information inside the 500-pound filing cabinet was stolen or simply misplaced when the agency moved to the city's Minoru Yasui Building from its old headquarters on West 14th Avenue.

Police haven't been called in yet, but Dillard said staffers are scouring every inch of the commission's new and old buildings and its warehouse - all of which are heavily secured. Officials also are questioning the bonded moving company that handled the relocation.

Dillard said it is possible that the microfilm was consolidated into other cabinets and boxes. Also missing is a box containing early voting signature cards, which contain voter names, birth dates, addresses, signatures and, in some cases, the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

The missing records are just the latest in a series of commission controversies.

Before last November's election, a clerical error forced the agency to pay $43,000 to re-mail a voters' guide, and City Council members blasted the agency for turning in a $3 million 2006 budget to fund two elections using polling places, when the commission was really driving toward a change to voting centers.

There was a leadership void at the agency when the records went missing because Executive Director Karon Hatchett resigned under criticism in January.

City Councilman Doug Linkhart said the discovery of the missing records "is not really surprising because the incompetence over there has been really consistent."

"I don't know how you misplace a filing cabinet," he said.

Linkhart added that he was glad that the commission has a new director, John Gaydeski. But he said he still finds "it hard to have faith in the commission."

He also said that the possibility of identity theft is a concern.

The missing records were first revealed May 31 on the Web blog heartbrokentiger.com under the headline, "Sad for Denver Voters."

Lisa Jones, who runs the site, said Friday that rumors about the missing files had been around for months, and she believes the commission was aware of the loss since at least April.

Jones, a former temporary commission worker during the 2003 mayoral election, said, "If a credit card company let such information out, people would be p----- off."

The loss, she said "is really huge."

Jones said she was surprised that officials are saying they only recently found out about the loss, but added, "What else are they going to say."

But Dillard insisted that top officials learned about the lost files only within the past week and that they're trying to determine if lower-ranking staff knew about the situation earlier.

gathrighta@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5486

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