A state hotline that opened Thursday for questions on the data breach that exposed private information of more than 6 million Georgia voters has received more than 440 calls from the public through Tuesday morning.
More than half the calls came Friday, the first full day of operation after the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office opened it. The line remains open at 404-654-6045, although the volume may have subsided: On Tuesday, nine calls had been received before noon.
“We will keep this line open,” said David B. Dove, the office’s assistant deputy secretary of state and legal counsel. “If any Georgian has questions about this data, they should call us. … We are ready to respond to their questions.”
The office has five employees dedicated to answering the line. Most callers, Dove said, have asked whether the data has been secured and whether their name was on the list of voters.
Anyone registered to vote in Georgia was affected by the disclosure — some 6.2 million people.
Secretary of State Brian Kemp last week fired an IT employee over what he called a "clerical error." Kemp said the employee inadvertently added the personal data, including Social Security numbers and birth dates, to a public statewide voter file before it was sent out last month to 12 organizations who regularly subscribe to "voter lists" maintained by the state.
The groups receiving the data — delivered via compact discs — included state political parties, news media organizations and Georgia GunOwner Magazine.
Kemp said all data discs illegally disclosing the private information had either been recovered or destroyed. He said he planned to hire top auditing agency Ernst & Young to review his technology department. He denied the disclosure was a breach of the state's voter registration system, saying the system itself was not hacked.
A similar but more limited disclosure by the office occurred in October 2012. According to emails obtained Friday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request, 12 voter registration lists containing sensitive personal data were sent out to people in 15 counties.
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