An election conspiracy peddler exposed dates of birth and home addresses online of more than 6 million Illinois voters earlier this year, including dozens of state and federal judges whose places of residence are legally protected, a WBEZ investigation has found.
An analysis of more than 30 websites of Lake Forest-based Local Government Information Services also identified home addresses for those involved in a high-profile federal narcotics case involving a foreign drug cartel, prosecutors involved in government corruption cases, Chicago sports luminaries, several billionaires and prominent Illinois actors and musicians.
The company operates local news websites that have drawn criticism as being politically one-sided “pink slime” operations. LGIS is being sued by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, who accused the company of breaking state election law by publishing privileged voter information held by the Illinois State Board of Elections that was accessible only to registered political committees.
The lawsuit says the company’s actions, going back to January, have subjected Illinois voters to the possibility of identity theft.
It also says the mass publication of names and addresses “poses a grave threat to certain classes of individuals, such as domestic violence victims, judges and law enforcement officers, whose safety will be endangered by having their private information published on the internet.”
In May, a Lake County judge overseeing that pending case ordered LGIS to remove specific birthdates and home street numbers for voters identified on the company’s websites.
But WBEZ found that tens of thousands of unredacted records from that trove of 6.2 million voter records remained accessible to the public even after that through services that snapshot and archive pages from the internet.
WBEZ was able to identify more than 76,000 such records on the archived pages that still contained full voter names and complete dates of birth and street addresses. The records included a federal judge and a member of the billionaire family who own the Cubs.
Finding someone on an LGIS website and matching them on internet archive sites takes only a few computer keystrokes. In less than a minute, their home addresses can be found.
Names matching nearly two dozen federal judges are identified in the voter information on LGIS’ websites.
That has triggered concern inside the Dirksen Federal Building, which hasn’t forgotten the 2005 killings of the husband and mother of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow by a disgruntled and delusional litigant, who later killed himself.
Also easily found were address street names for Illinois Supreme Court justices and the judge hearing the LGIS case.
The breadth of people who work in state and federal courthouses across Illinois whose home addresses were exposed for months wasn’t spelled out in such explicit detail in Raoul’s lawsuit against LGIS. Nor was the fact that sensitive information is archived and remains available online despite the judge’s order.
“Horrific is my reaction,” Chief U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall said when told of the information that remains online. “To think that you uncovered a number of judges and their home addresses with such ease is not something that any of my colleagues would find comfortable. They would find that quite distressing.”
Judicial Privacy Act protects judges
The Illinois Judicial Privacy Act was passed in 2012, prompted by the Lefkow relatives’ killings. It bars publication of judges’ home addresses if a judge requests that the information be removed. If people post such information, knowing it could pose a threat to a judge, and harm ensues, they can be charged with a felony.
That law does not provide protections to prosecutors, police officers, prison guards, revenue agents or child-welfare caseworkers — a potential gap that exposes those government employees, whose jobs can take them into volatile situations.
In 2021, Congress passed a law barring the resale of federal judges’ personally identifiable information by data brokers. That law lets judges redact personal information displayed on federal websites. It also restricts the publication of judges’ personal information by businesses and people in cases in which there’s no legitimate news value or public interest.
Thomas Bruton, who’s the federal court clerk in Chicago, invoked the Illinois law in asking that LGIS remove home addresses for all federal judges in the court system’s Northern District of Illinois. Bruton said he made the request of LGIS after the state elections board asked the company last April to remove birthdates and home addresses for voters. He said LGIS complied, removing that information for judges he brought to the company’s attention.
But home street names for federal judges still can be found on LGIS websites, though specific street addresses were removed.
Kendall said that poses a serious hazard for judges, noting that one judge lives on a street that’s just two blocks long.
“My goodness, anyone could sit out and watch a two-block-long street and determine where a judge lives,” she said. “That isn’t helpful at all if it is just redacting or removing street numbers. It needs to have the street itself removed as well, and the Illinois Judicial Privacy Act requires that. So it would be a violation to have that out there.”
A New York academic who once worked for the Secret Service and the federal Department of Homeland Security said publishing anything about judges’, prosecutors’ or police officers’ home addresses — even just a street name — poses a security risk.
“If you go online, you have a particular score to settle, now you know where that individual lives, or you narrow down where that individual lives, and then you start taking the steps to do them harm,” said Anthony Cangelosi, a lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “We’re giving them vital information to locate that person, to start surveilling that person on a regular basis to see where they go, what their daily routine is, when’s the best time…to do this and not get caught.”
U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow testifying in 2005 in Washington before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The killings of Lefkow’s husband and mother prompted the passage of the Illinois’ Judicial Privacy Act, which bars publication of judges’ home addresses if a judge requests that the information be removed.
AP file
Earlier this year, the head of the U.S. Marshals Service, which provides security to federal courthouses and for people who work in those buildings, told a congressional committee that the number of verified threats against federal judges has doubled in the last three years.
In response to questions, Brian Timpone, the president of LGIS, wrote that it’s the job of the state elections board to safeguard judicial addresses.
“Worth noting that we have been publishing public records all around the country for 20 years and that it isn’t unusual for states/counties to be derelict in their statutory obligations like this one,” Timpone said by email. “Legislatures pass laws like these, but the custodians of state public records don’t obfuscate the names.”
Without going into detail, Timpone wrote that his company has “processes by which anyone in law enforcement can alert us to this so we can remove their names. This happens frequently.”
Attempts to reach Christine Svenson, Timpone’s lawyer, with further questions went unanswered.
Among those questions — which Timpone didn’t address — was whether LGIS considered the possible safety ramifications of identifying where judges and prosecutors live.
How did LGIS get voter rolls?
Besides listing Timpone’s role as president, state business records identify LGIS’ secretary as John Tillman, who also is chairman of the right-tilting Illinois Policy Institute.
Raoul’s lawsuit also lists Republican political operative and radio talk-show host Dan Proft as an owner of LGIS when it was founded in 2016.
Proft led the state political action committee Liberty Principles PAC, to which the state elections board provided voter information in 2016, according to Raoul’s lawsuit.
The attorney general’s suit says Proft’s PAC provided that information to LGIS for publication and that the company merged that information with 2020 voter information obtained from an unidentified political committee.
Proft, of Naples, Florida, is chair and treasurer of the Illinois political committee called the People Who Play By The Rules PAC. At that committee’s request, the state election board provided it with 2020 voter information, according to Matt Dietrich, a spokesman for the state agency.
Proft didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
Timpone said his company published “verbatim” the election information the state provided.
Dietrich said that, under state law, the voter files including exact addresses are “available for purchase only by registered political committees for political use and government entities using it for governmental purposes.”
He said his agency removes information about judges from the voter rolls when requested and also does so for people in the state’s Address Confidentiality Program. which aims to protect victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking and stalking.
Some of the information that LGIS published isn’t even available to political committees any longer. In 2018, the state stopped releasing dates of birth for voters to political committees.
“The problem in this case is that it appears a voter file from 2016 was used at least in part to create lists containing full street addresses published on websites in 2024,” Dietrich said. “It is possible that those who enlisted in these programs after 2016 may have had their addresses published from the 2016 file.”
Timpone on why addresses were published
Last March, Timpone appeared on Proft’s Chicago radio program and talked about why he published the voter information. Timpone cast suspicion on how votes were tallied in Cook County’s recent state’s attorney’s race and about signature validation in Georgia in the “debacle of 2020” presidential election. Timpone is involved in another group that operates a national voter database, which he says is necessary to prevent voter fraud.
“Let’s make sure everybody who’s registered is made public,” Timpone told Proft, who said he and Timpone “do newspapers together.”
“A lot of people hear that and say, ‘I don’t want my voter information made public,’ ” Timpone said. “That’s a bedrock of democracy, that a person who votes is actually a real person. What people should really be afraid of is there’s no validation process at all for a registered voter.”
In Chicago, the claim that there’s no verification of voters isn’t true. Nor is there evidence of widespread voter fraud in Chicago or in Illinois.
No form of identification is required to vote in Chicago if people already are registered at their current address, are voting in the correct precinct, have a signature that matches the one on file and election judges don’t challenge their right to vote.
But more forms of identification can be required if someone’s right to vote is challenged and also during the voter-registration process.
While Timpone’s websites published sensitive information about millions of other Illinois voters, information about his date of birth and home addresses couldn’t be found on LGIS’ voter rolls. But Cook County election records show Timpone was registered to vote and did so in 2020.
“It’s pretty clear that he’s providing himself extra privacy, whereas he’s not doing that for everyone else [whose] information he has,” Cangelosi said. “I don’t see any good reason for it.”
Timpone didn’t say anything in his written comments to WBEZ about why his name didn’t appear in LGIS’ voter data.
Impact of exposing voter info
That some voters’ dates of birth and home addresses remained easily accessible online came as no surprise to Raoul’s office.
“Once information has been posted online, it rarely stays contained to the original source, making it difficult to completely remove from the web,” Raoul spokeswoman Annie Thompson said. “That is one of the reasons this litigation is important: to make clear to those who obtain voter information that they cannot and should not use it for purposes other than those outlined in the statute.”
The company’s publication of Illinois voter data isn’t the first time such information has been exposed. In 2016, Russian hackers were accused by the Justice Department of illegally accessing approximately 90,000 voter records on file with the Illinois State Board of Elections. Also, this summer, databases exposed 4.6 million Illinois voter records on the internet, according to Wired.
A 2017 Pew Research survey found that 11% of eligible unregistered voters said they chose not to register due to privacy or security reasons.
John Davisson, director of litigation for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the publication of voter registration records can have a chilling effect on the democratic process.
“If you are worried that you are going to face some sort of negative consequence … as a result of signing up to vote and giving the state that personal information necessary to vote, you’re just going to be less likely to do it,” Davisson said.
“This case is exactly why many states impose access- and use-restrictions on personal voter data,” he said. “It exemplifies the threat that can flow from misuse of that information for purposes other than civic participation and voter roll maintenance.”
Once this kind of data appears on the internet, it can be hard to delete it because companies that trade in personal information can easily download backup copies.
“The data-broker industry is a multibillion-dollar industry,” Davisson said. “It includes a whole range of companies — some more or less scrupulous. And many of the big brokers out there engage in large-scale scraping of personal information from websites and don’t apply a lot of scrutiny to where that information came from and whether it was wrongfully disclosed in the first instance.
“There’s a lot of unregulated conduct and activity in the data broker industry,” Davisson said. “But it is still largely the wild West. So the disclosure of voter-registration information online can absolutely feed into that ecosystem.”
Springfield weighs in
While voter rolls had long been provided to political action committees and parties for political use, the public didn’t have the right to copies of the full voter list in Illinois until a 2022 federal court ruling in favor of a right-leaning organization that had sued the state. State law previously banned the public release of the lists. The group successfully argued that federal voting law allowed for it and was in conflict with Illinois’ restrictive policy.
In July, a law signed by Gov. JB Pritzker codified public access to the lists but limited disclosure to exclude voters’ phone numbers, Social Security numbers, street numbers of home addresses and birthdates.
The law also prohibits the use of that information for “any personal, private or commercial purpose, including, but not limited to, the intimidation, threat or deception of any person or the advertising, solicitation, sale or marketing of products or services.”
In Kendall’s view, there’s no legitimate purpose in releasing any information on home addresses for judges and prosecutors given the increasing threats they face.
But the judge also said there’s a bigger issue for the judiciary — and for the American system of government.
“People have to operate within that system without fear of harm, and that’s when democracy works,” Kendall said. “If they are afraid to come in to the courthouse, if prosecutors are afraid to bring criminal charges against those who are violating the law, then we have this complete breakdown of our democracy.”
This story is part of the The Democracy Solutions Project, a partnership among WBEZ, the Chicago Sun-Times and the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government examining critical issues facing our democracy in the runup to the 2024 elections.
