Alberta’s Voters Data Breach Was Very Bad. And Inevitable

It may have been the fringy Republican Party of Alberta that got caught letting data from its copy of Alberta’s 2.9-million-name voters’ list be published online in violation of the law, but it is the law-bending style of politics embedded in this province by the United Conservative Party that made such a breach inevitable.

Meanwhile, it’s the giant sucking sound south of the border known as artificial intelligence that makes it a potential disaster that could linger for years.

The story was broken by independent journalist Jeremy Appel Wednesday night when he showed up at a meeting of a separatist group sophomorically called the Centurion Project — and so did police with an Elections Alberta official and a letter from the chief electoral officer saying the group was under investigation for improperly accessing the province’s list of electors.

By now, thanks to Appel’s scoop, the facts are well known and have been widely reported. Including the news that Calgary journalist Jen Gerson alerted Elections Alberta to the breach weeks ago but, according to Elections Alberta, UCP legislation prevented launching a timely investigation.

Swept into the AI cloud

With the horse out of the barn, Elections Alberta has said in a news release that it “is taking seriously the unauthorized use of the Republican Party of Alberta’s copy of the List of Electors by the Centurion Project Ltd.”

“We wish to reinforce that Elections Alberta is taking every possible action to protect and recover the information,” Elections Alberta said.

OK, then! Know, though, dear readers, that protecting and recovering the names, addresses, phone numbers and voter registration numbers on the list is impossible because it is bound to have been gobbled up by the AI monster. The massive leak is guaranteed to be used for fraud, identity threat, harassment, abuse and a legion of other evils. The name of virtually every Albertan reading this story is on the list!

Despite Elections Alberta’s unachievable aspiration, its release includes a useful timeline of how its investigation developed after the agency learned that the Republican Party of Alberta’s copy of the list, which is distributed to all registered political parties, had found its way into the hands of the Centurion Project.

The group, registered as a third-party advertiser, was ordered by a judge to pull down the searchable database created from the list to help its supporters press friends, neighbours and family members to vote yes on the separation plebiscite Premier Danielle Smith and her UCP government are determined to hold next fall, come what may.

Centurion Project leader David Parker, known for his past association with Take Back Alberta, said Thursday it had done so. “The Centurion Project plans to fully comply with Elections Alberta’s investigation,” he tweeted.

However, we have to face it, that information was gone with the wind by merit of the fact it had been online for more than 30 seconds.

A call to clamp down on parties

“What happened here is very serious,” said the province’s information commissioner, Diane McLeod, stating the blindingly obvious.

“More than 2.9 million Albertans have had their personal information breached,” she continued. “For some of these individuals there is likely a real risk of significant harm given that their home address and phone numbers have been made public. This could be especially harmful for certain individuals. Some examples might be those who work for law enforcement, who are public officials, who are fleeing intimate partner violence and other vulnerable individuals.”

All true, of course.

“This incident demonstrates that it is high time for political parties to be made subject to PIPA,” McLeod added, a reference to Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act, which does not apply to political parties because, of course, political parties drafted the legislation.

This was the first useful and practical observation to be made by an official since this story came to public attention. It is unlikely to happen but is probably the best we could hope for.

I would go further, though. While it is unreasonable to think any Alberta political party would agree to such a thing, there would be no harm and much good in depriving all political parties of this information altogether.

Leastways, it’s hard to imagine how it would hurt democracy for parties to have to get out and make their case to all voters instead of cultivating their most extreme party base and trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the rest of the population as the UCP does.

The UCP’s shameless Wild West

We can count on such breaches happening again because the sort of “gentlemen’s agreements” made because no democratic politician wanted to get caught stepping outside the bounds of propriety are no more. Donald Trump, his Canadian imitators and the Wild Rose MAGA movement have put an end to that. They have no shame, so they can’t be shamed. Other parties can be expected to follow if only out of an instinct to survive.

The United Conservative Party’s voting universe encompasses a whole ecosystem of registered far-right agitators like the Centurion Project, Take Back Alberta and the Alberta Prosperity Project; separatist parties like the Republican Party of Alberta, the Independence Party of Alberta and the Wildrose Independence Party of Alberta; and fundraising and advocacy parties like the Pro-Life Association of Alberta. The activities of these groups often appear to be co-ordinated with each other and with the UCP. Their personnel, as we have seen, are frequently interchangeable.

Some seem to work to crack the Overton window wider to extremist ideas already supported by Premier Smith’s inner circle; some to give the UCP leadership’s separatist and MAGA inclinations plausible deniability; some to advance social conservative causes like anti-“woke” hysteria, anti-abortionism and religious home-schoolery widely supported within the UCP caucus.

All appear influenced by the idea prevalent in the U.S. Republican party and MAGA movement that the rules are only for the other side.

Consider what happened when Red Tape Reduction Minister Dale Nally, MLA for Morinville-St. Albert, breached the law by accessing the list of electors in his riding for “a purpose not authorized by the Election Act” — to wit, to discover information about a citizen of his riding who launched a recall petition against him.

The Elections Alberta official who investigated that case closed the file without levying an administrative penalty or writing a letter of reprimand. Instead, she wrote, Elections Alberta “provided advice to support future use of the List of Electors.”

Perhaps they will do the same thing for the Republican Party of Alberta. After all, This Is Alberta (TIA).