The books, spanning thousands of pages in searchable PDF format, were quietly posted in February, the first time they had been available on the Board of Elections website. Officials said the online publication was necessary given changes to election law at the state level.
But after a series of news reports regarding the decision, some election and privacy experts warned that it could make sensitive personal information too readily available. And officials including Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, warned that the decision to publish the books could undermine public trust in the electoral process and jeopardize the security of voter information.
By Tuesday, the voter rolls had been removed from the Board of Elections’ website. Michael Ryan, the board’s executive director, said the board had made the decision during a conference call Monday, partly in response to public outrage after the media reports.
“Up until a media inquiry into this matter, we had seen no complaints from anyone that this information was there,” Ryan said Tuesday during a previously planned City Council hearing about election changes.
But, he said, “Since people were getting upset, we took it down.”
Voter rolls are public information by law. Political parties have long used voter rolls to target potential supporters. But historically, anybody interested in accessing it had to make a request to the state or local Board of Elections, which would then provide it on a CD or in a printed book, sometimes for a fee.
Elections experts said that those requests or purchases formed a log of who was trying to access the information. It also allowed elections officials to stipulate how the information could be used, such as for noncommercial purposes only.
The availability of voter data has become a flashpoint in recent years, as digital privacy concerns have gained prominence, and as President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to collect voter information for apparently political purposes.
Only two states, North Carolina and Ohio, make their data freely available for download on public sites, according to Michael McDonald, an associate professor at the University of Florida who runs The United States Election Project, which tracks election law across the country. Washington, D.C., published its voter rolls online in 2016 but discontinued the practice after receiving blowback.
Privacy experts worried that the ready availability of the information could endanger domestic violence survivors and others who might be subject to harassment, stalking or mail spam. Domestic violence survivors can request to be removed from the public rolls but must first obtain a court order.
Elected officials had denounced the board’s decision to publish the rolls online after WNYC reported it Thursday.
“I think it was a mistake,” Cuomo said Monday. “Putting people’s personal information online — in this new world, we’re worried about hacking; we’re worrying about identity theft.”
He added: “People can take it and use it to bad effect one way or the other.”
A spokeswoman for Johnson said Friday that the council would probe whether the information’s publication violated the law. And de Blasio said Monday that though he supported additional transparency, the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by accusations of inefficiency, should have alerted voters that it was posting the rolls.
“Out of the mists of years and years of not giving us very clear information and purging people in the middle of the night, suddenly everything is online,” the mayor said.
Ryan had defended the decision as a one-off response to changes in the state election law that occurred earlier this year, which moved up the deadline by which the board is required to publish voter enrollment books. Because the board could not print books in time for the new deadline, he said, it decided to post digital files.
The board did not publicize the reversal of its decision, nor did it inform the City Council before a council member asked about it at the hearing Tuesday. The page where the books were previously posted now directs people to visit a Board of Elections office in person.
Ryan said the decision to remove the books from the board’s website was also influenced by practical reasons: The voter rolls were no longer needed by candidates seeking to win a spot on the ballot for this year’s primary elections, he said; the deadline for submitting petitions has passed.
Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy advocacy group, said the Board of Elections had made the right decision to take the information down, but that it might have been too little, too late.
“We’re still alarmed that information on millions of New Yorkers could be exposed so easily,” Cahn said in a statement. “This episode highlights just how vulnerable our privacy is.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.