No on H campaign releases hundreds of Republican donor, activist and convention attendee e-mails into the wind.

Received an interesting e-mail from the No on H organization yesterday. If you aren’t familiar with your acronyms, they’re the ones fighting open primaries.  And while they are fighting open primaries, they also seem to be fighting stupidity.

Clearly, they seem to like the open exchange of information, as they sent out the e-mail addresses of over 400 Republican County Officials, Donors, and Convention attendees out to the world for God and everyone to see.

And harvest. Let’s not forget they sent them out to harvest.

So, here’s the e-mail that looked like an innocent solicitation, until you caught it:

And here it is – the part that should get your attention:

If you’re sending out an e-mail to a group of people, if you put the names under BCC: (Blind Carbon Copy), no one sees who else you’ve sent the e-mail list to. But if you CC:, a.k.a. Carbon Copy, everyone gets it, AND everyone sees everyone else’s e-mail.

It’s a golden nugget for a marketing person looking for a list of Republican activists.

That’s right. Between No on H chair Ezra Hays and his East River Coordinator, Juliann Talkington, neither one knows how to send out a group e-mail to save their life. Because everyone in the group now has everyone else’s e-mail, to do with as they wish. Page after page of e-mails.

Just to give you an idea of how many Republican e-mails they sent to the wind, here’s the list, although slightly blurred:

That’s a lot of e-mail addresses.

Suffice it to say people are displeased. And even more than that, the committee isn’t exactly entirely honest about where they got the list.

One of the hundreds on the list went to the committee to ask where they got their contact information, and the No on H team couldn’t even be honest about that.

In the exchange that was shared with me:

Juliann Talkington, 

How did you get my personal information because I do not recall ever personally giving it to you. Did you personally talk to everyone else attached to this email too asking their permission to be contacted? 

I know you didn’t because I sure didn’t give out my personal email to either of you. Take me off any and all lists that you have. 

to which they replied ..

I am sorry. It is my fault that everyone’s email was visible. I am traveling overseas and the bcc did not work properly. The information is available through the secretary of state system, but we try not to send emails the way I did. 

Again, I am very sorry and am happy to remove you from the list.

Juliann

What? Since when does the SOS hand out hundreds of e-mails? The problem wth this response is that this answer was complete bulls*t.

Juliann, 

I do not believe anything you say when you can’t even be honest about where you got my email? It was not from the Secretary of State system, but stick to that story if it makes you feel better about yourself. 

How about you not straight up lie. My email is not on my voter registration.

Here is an idea for you, get familiar with and read the federal TCPA laws- telecommunications protection act. It forbids the use of data mining for the purpose of sending political messages and robocalling. I hope where ever you got my personal email from you also didn’t get everyone’s cell phone numbers too because sending those without permission is illegal too. 

As you immediately remove me from your email list. Do yourself a favor and remove the rest of the 400 some people included, because I know you didn’t get all of our personal emails from the Secretary of State system. 

These lists were not from the Secretary of State, who last I knew were not in the business of handing out personal e-mails.

They clearly came from the GOP, who does collect this information for convention, from donors, and from members of the State Central Committee and likely handed it over to the group, because they are joining the party in opposing Amendment H.

The mistake the party may have made is that they did not realize that they were working with stupid people who do not know how to use e-mail to send communications. The same stupid people who have now released closely held contact information for hundreds of Republican donors, activists, and convention attendees into the wind for all to see.

I suspect that the first zoom call meeting of the No on H Ground Advisory Board and Action Team tonight, if they can get any attendees, will be spent dealing with their first PR disaster; that they can’t be trusted to use e-mail correctly and to not hand out information shared with them for the campaign.

And if they can’t even be trusted to use e-mail correctly, why should anyone trust what they have to say about elections?