Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, now a Democratic candidate for state attorney general, has politically exploited her office’s database of citizens’ names assembled over the course of a decade at taxpayers’ expense — by having her 2010 election committee send unsolicited e-mails to thousands of people in the database in search of political support and campaign contributions.
Now Bysiewicz’s office has come under investigation by the state’s current attorney general, Richard Blumenthal. Two members of his staff are investigating a complaint by a Republican activist, who received unwanted Bysiewicz campaign e-mails and charged that she has misused “official state data” for political purposes.
Bysiewicz Saturday confirmed Blumenthal is investigating her office but denied that anything improper happened. Blumenthal could not be reached for comment.
You can read in depth about the situation by clicking on this link to the Sunday Courant Government Watch column. But here are some additional comments by Bysiewicz in explaining why she had her exploratory campaign committee file a Freedom of Information Act request Feb. 2, 2009,for “an electronic copy of the Secretary of the State’s current … database.”
Asked whose idea it was, she said, “I talked about it with my campaign and we decided to make the request.”
So it was her idea, then?
“And our campaign’s idea,” she said. “It wasn’t just me. It was members of our campaign.”
She was asked how this is different from a controversial episode in the 2006 gubernatorial election campaign. In that episode, Republican Gov. N. Jodi Rell’s chief of staff, M. Lisa Moody, had someone on her office staff copy onto a computer disk an official state list obtained from the state’s culture and tourism agency, containing the names and addresses leaders of scores of tourism and arts groups; Moody then handed it over to Rell’s campaign committee for fund-raising purposes.
Bysiewicz said submitting the formal FOI request last year made a big difference. “You have a paper trail for what was done. It is a public record, it’s open and transparent. … Without a request from the campaign, then there are questions about, well, is that information from tourism being requested for a state purpose or a non-state purpose? … It was our intent to be very open, to be extremely transparent.”
Bysiewicz’s office database goes back to 1999, her first year in office, and contains the names of 36,000 citizens (and nearly 9,900 e-mail addresses) who have asked her office for information or help, or otherwise had contact with it.
If you contact Bysiewicz’s office with a question, or serve on some citizen committee involved with public voting issues that she supervises, you get put into the database and start getting periodic e-mail newsletters from the secretary of the state’s office about current issues.
When Bysiewicz had her campaign obtain the database from the office a year ago, people in the database started getting a second e-mail newsletter — this one from her campaign committee, Friends of Susan 2010. Those newsletters contained campaign material to build up her candidacy — for governor, at the time, before she shifted her sights on the attorney general’s office in January. Some of those newsletters provided a way for people to donate to the campaign committee.
There’s nothing wrong with any of that, Bysiewicz said, because the database is a public record that anyone can request — even another candidate, although none has. And, she said, both the official and campaign e-mail newsletters contain an “opt-out” provision, meaning with a simple computer-click recipients can stop receiving them.