Efforts to detect voter fraud led to the exposure of private voter data from nearly 1,000 Kansas residents this year by officials in Florida, who released information including partial Social Security numbers to a woman who had filed an open records request. The incident is raising more questions about the Interstate Crosscheck System, which was designed in Kansas to detect double voting or people who register to vote in more than one state, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported. The Crosscheck system, set up in 2005 by former Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh, has been criticized in the past for concerns about security and identifying false matches. In response to the data exposure, Florida election officials on Friday offered a year of free fraud detection and protection services to those affected by the data release.
In 2013, Kansas sent a list of 945 potential double registrants to Florida over an unsecured email account. The list of voters in the two states who shared first and last names and a date of birth also included partial Social Security numbers. In September, the Florida Department of State released the list in response to an open records request filed by Anita Parsa, a resident of Mission Hills, Kansas.
Parsa said she didn’t ask for any data but was trying to determine why Florida decided to leave the Crosscheck program.
When she saw the unsecured email, “I was floored,” said Parsa, who began working with the advocacy group Indivisible Chicago after filing the request.
Full Article: Voter data for nearly 1K Kansas residents exposed in Florida | The Herald.