By Guy Page
The bank account information for at least two statewide candidates was inadvertently published on the Vermont Secretary of State’s page last week.
The information has since been taken down from the website, but remains in files downloaded before the error was caught. Here’s what happened: Following state law regarding financial disclosures, a Republican candidate for one statewide office and a Democratic incumbent and candidate for another statewide office submitted their tax returns to the Secretary of State. These tax returns include personal bank routing and account numbers required for refunds.
The candidates’ failure to black out this information – an act of discretion and personal protection they’re permitted to do – was not caught by election officials at the Secretary of State’s office.
VDC knows the identities and offices of the affected candidates and downloaded the over-informative tax returns before they were scrubbed by the SecState. We are choosing to not make their identities known out of concern for potential identity theft.
Director of Elections Sean Sheehan admitted the personal data breach occurred and blamed it on candidates sharing too much information and a rush of candidate petitions and financial information coming in at deadline.
Sheehan, who succeeded longtime Director of Elections Will Senning in May, 2024, Saturday, August 2 sent this explanation to VDC:
“Some candidates choose to submit more information to be publicly posted than they are required to do so. Our office does strive to redact information that could be considered sensitive while still posting submissions in a timely manner. This material tends to come in in high volumes at filing deadlines. If/when a candidate or other party notifies us of information such a bank routing number that they didn’t redact, we promptly make the change for them.
“That was the case for the candidate you reference. If you’re still seeing the routing number in the file, I’m assuming you must be looking at a cached version stored on your computer. If you refresh to see the live version, it should look like the screenshot below.
“We are also looking into changes for future election cycles that could provide additional communication to remind candidates to redact information they don’t want to be public and/or measures to prevent them from submitting more information than is required.”
The incident was reported to VDC by perennial GOP statewide office candidate and frequent Secretary of State’s office critic, H. Brooke Paige of the Orange County town of Washington.
“The SoS office seems to be claiming this breach is not their fault, but are trying to mitigate the damage?,” Paige wrote in an email last week. “This is what happens when your staff leaves (or is chased out) and your office has no institutional memory. Imagine what a [fecal matter display] the General Election will be with the new Universal Vote-by-Mail and vote harvesting complications added to the usual election troubles.”