Dereliction of Data

Lynn Greer, who has served on the commission since 2003, recalls a conversation with election administrator Ray Barrett after the theft in which Barrett essentially fingered an employee for compromising the data of 337,000 registered voters. He told Greer he’d given commission employee Kathy Deshotels, a tech supervisor, a simple directive to protect the voter data.

“When he called me to tell me this had happened, he said, ‘I told her to remove the Social Security numbers from the database, and she told me she had done it,’ ” Greer says.

In an interview with the Scene, Barrett says it had in fact occurred to him after the mayor’s runoff election last September that the election commission didn’t need to store the full nine digits of Social Security numbers.

“What had happened was I was riding up the road one morning and I thought, ‘We don’t need anything but the last four,’ ” he recalls. Barrett, of course, is referring to the last group of Social Security digits, which are sufficient to identify a voter.

So what happened after Barrett’s road-to-Damascus moment? Though Greer recalls the conversation with Barrett quite clearly, Barrett himself declines to say one way or another whether he asked Deshotels to remove the confidential data. “We’ve been instructed to lay low,” he says.

On Christmas eve, in a heist that wasn’t exactly out of Ocean’s Eleven, a thief or two busted through an office of the Davidson County Election Commission at the old Howard School complex on Second Avenue South. They took only a pair of cheap laptops, but on at least one of those computers was a database listing Social Security numbers for all 337,000 of Davidson County’s registered voters. Now Nashvillians are at risk for identity theft, and though it’s unlikely that a small-time burglar would know what to do with the data, it’s the fiduciary malpractice that counts: Who in their right mind would place such sensitive information on an unsecured laptop?

Even if Deshotels weren’t in the picture, Metro Government has a policy about such things, which Ray Barrett heard for the first time from the Scene. The city’s information systems department warns on page two of its policy handbook that “highly sensitive or confidential data on portable devices should be encrypted.” Lest it’s not perfectly clear that a voter’s Social Security number qualifies as “confidential data,” Metro lists it as such on page one of the handbook.

But, of course, Deshotels is in the picture. And perhaps Barrett’s reluctance to finger her publicly has something to do with what happened to the last person who took on the well-connected Deshotels. In 2003, then-election administrator Michael McDonald fired this longtime subordinate for starring in a partisan flame war. Commission member and labor bigwig Eddie Bryan, a friend of Deshotels, had asked her to secretly snatch the computer files of Sharon Wood, an employee in charge of recruiting Republican poll workers for local elections. Given that Wood’s job required her to run in GOP circles, it wasn’t a surprise when she had a few overtly partisan documents on her desktop. So when Deshotels turned them over to her supervisors, they found no fault with Wood.

If only it had ended there. Bryan, a registered AFL-CIO lobbyist, apparently felt that Wood had erred. McDonald would later say that Bryan called him and demanded that he fire Wood, while making ominous threats. In fact, McDonald then filed a police report against Bryan but stopped short of pressing charges. Within a year, McDonald was out of a job after Bryan and his two other Democratic colleagues on the commission voted to oust him.

Deshotels, meanwhile, kept her gig, even though her lawsuit against Metro came at the expense of her credibility. First, election commission tongues wagged when a city attorney asked Deshotels during a deposition whether she had a romantic relationship with Bryan. Deshotels denied it, but Metro attorneys clearly felt the employee had acted improperly when she heeded Bryan’s request to investigate a colleague. Then, Harriet Hill, a 40-year veteran and then the second-ranking employee at the election commission, gave a deposition in which she talked of how she recommended Deshotels be fired for “causing disturbances with other employees” and spreading “untruths.” She added that Deshotels’ work was sloppy and said, “Anytime any problem comes up, Miss Deshotels has been in the middle of the situation.”

As it turns out, one of the stolen laptops was snatched from underneath Deshotels’ desk, an odd place to keep a computer storing 337,000 Social Security numbers. Now the question is whether Deshotels, who is paid $66,000 to maintain voter databases, ever was asked to safeguard such sensitive info as Greer claims.