News
by Matt Pulle
What one member of the Davidson County Election Commission says now about the notorious break-in at the voting agency renders almost moot the shoddy performance of Wackenhut, the city’s security firm whose guard was humming along with Christmas music and chowing down on Italian when the heist went down.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.
Ted Carey and George Barrett, the high-powered attorneys who filed the federal lawsuit to win Deshotels her job back in 2003, don’t have an answer. In fact, they sound more at ease attacking Greer for pointing the finger at their client. Barrett says, apropos of nothing really, that Greer’s “daddy,” a former banker, was a great Democrat.
“Lynn has sipped at the table of the Democrats and now he’s a wild, right-wing Republican,” Barrett says, going on to accuse Greer of being inattentive during the aftermath of the election commission break-in. “Mr. Greer cared so much about this that he went to go skiing while Rome burned.”
But Carey and Barrett ditch the amusing rhetoric for the passive voice of legalese when asked a seemingly straightforward question about their client. Was she ever instructed to remove the full Social Security numbers from those laptops?
“The storage on computers is complicated, not simple. And modifying that information takes IT expertise,” Carey says. “It is our belief that the Metro IT department was involved in efforts to change the nature and content of the Social Security storage.”
But IT director Sandy Cole says that her staff told Deshotels and others on the election commission that such data shouldn’t have been on there in the first place.
In any case, it’s not as if the election commission is the only villain here. There was, after all, the Wackenhut security guard, believed to be on duty at the time of the break in, who admitted to listening to Christmas music and splurging on Italian food instead of making his hourly rounds. The company itself, under fire for similar lapses nationwide, was also found to have billed Metro for days when its guards failed to show up. And some Metro Council members say that Cole and her department should have made sure the election commission was doing a better job protecting the agency’s data.
“There are so many layers here. It’s hard to determine who is most to blame,” says council member Michael Craddock. “But there’s plenty of blame to go around.”
Still, this would have been a story about a $300 robbery if Kathy Deshotels or Ray Barrett had shown more discretion with the sensitive data in their charge.
“I don’t know if it’s her responsibility or the guard’s or Mr. Barrett’s,” says Eddie Bryan. “It’s a shame that it happened. I don’t know what else there is to say.”
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