GOP-leaning websites showed where Illinois judges live despite a law that protects their privacy

An election conspiracy peddler exposed dates of birth and home addresses online for 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 public corruption cases, prominent Illinois-based actors and musicians, Chicago sports luminaries and several billionaires.

The company operates local news websites that critics have derided as politically one-sided “pink slime” operations. LGIS is being sued by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul for allegedly breaking state election law by publishing privileged voter information held by the State Board of Elections and that was accessible only to registered political committees.

The state lawsuit alleged the company’s actions, which date back to January, subjected Illinois voters to possible identity theft. LGIS’ mass publication of names and addresses also “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,” the lawsuit said.

A Lake County judge overseeing that still-pending case ordered LGIS in May to remove specific birth dates and home address street numbers for voters identified on the company’s websites.

But an exclusive analysis by WBEZ found tens of thousands of unredacted records from that trove of 6.2 million voter records remained publicly accessible afterward 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 along with complete dates of birth and street addresses. The records included at least one federal judge and a member of a billionaire family that owns the Chicago Cubs.

Finding someone on an LGIS website and matching them up on internet archive sites takes a matter of a few computer keystrokes and, in less than a minute, their specific 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 Chicago’s Dirksen Federal Building, which has not forgotten the grisly 2005 murders 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 for even the judge hearing the LGIS case.

The breadth of people who work in state and federal courthouses across Illinois whose sensitive home address information was exposed for months was not spelled out in such explicit detail in the state lawsuit against LGIS. Nor was the fact that sensitive information is archived and remains readily available online despite the judge’s order.

“Horrific is my reaction,” U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall, the newly seated chief judge of the Northern District of Illinois, said when told about the information still 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,” she said.

Judicial Privacy Act protects judges

The state has a law called the Illinois Judicial Privacy Act, enacted in 2012 and inspired by the Lefkow family tragedy, that bars publication of judges’ home addresses if a judge requests the information be removed. Anyone who posts such information, knowing it potentially poses a threat to a judge and harm actually ensues, could be charged with a felony.

That law does not provide protections to prosecutors, police officers, prison guards, revenue agents or child-welfare caseworkers, representing a potential gap in Illinois law that exposes those public employees whose jobs can take them into potentially volatile situations.

Additionally, in 2021, Congress passed legislation barring the resale of federal judges’ personally identifiable information by data brokers and allowing judges to redact personal information displayed on federal websites. It also restricts the publication of judges’ personal information by businesses and individuals where there is no legitimate news value or public interest.

The clerk of the federal court for the Northern District of Illinois, Thomas Bruton, formally invoked the Illinois law in asking that LGIS remove home addresses for all federal judges in the district.

Bruton said he made the request of LGIS after the State Board of Elections publicly asked the company last April to remove birth dates and home addresses for voters. LGIS complied in removing those items for judges he brought to the company’s attention, he said.

Despite that move by LGIS, home street names for federal judges can still be found on LGIS websites, though street numbers no longer appear. Kendall said that poses a serious hazard for judges, citing one instance where a judge lives on a street that is just two blocks long.

“My goodness, anyone could sit out and watch a two-block long street and determine where a judge lives,” she continued. “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 U.S. Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security agreed that 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 in New York.

“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,” he said.

Earlier this year, the head of the U.S. Marshals office, which provides security to federal courthouses and those 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 a brief email statement to WBEZ, LGIS president Brian Timpone said the burden of safeguarding judicial addresses rests with the state election board.

“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 wrote. “Legislatures pass laws like these, but the custodians of state public records don’t obfuscate the names.”

Without offering 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.”

Multiple queries from WBEZ to his lawyer, Christine Svenson, went unanswered.

Among the unanswered questions for Svenson — and that Timpone did not address — was whether LGIS ever considered the possible security ramifications of identifying where judges and prosecutors lived.

How did LGIS get voter rolls?

Besides listing Timpone’s role as president, state business records identify LGIS’ secretary as John Tillman, chairman of the right-tilting Illinois Policy Institute.

Raoul’s lawsuit also listed GOP 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 Board of Elections provided voter roll information in 2016, the lawsuit alleged.

The attorney general’s office, in its lawsuit, alleged that Proft’s PAC provided that information to LGIS for publication. The company allegedly merged that information with 2020 voter roll information it obtained from an unidentified political committee, the lawsuit alleged.

Proft, of Naples, Florida, is chair and treasurer of an Illinois political committee known as People Who Play By The Rules PAC. At that committee’s request, the state election board provided it with 2020 voter roll information, a State Board of Elections spokesman told WBEZ. It’s not clear whether Proft or the committee then delivered that information to LGIS.

Proft did not respond to an email query from WBEZ. Timpone, in his emailed statement, did not answer a question about how LGIS obtained the voter rolls.

Timpone noted that his firm published “verbatim” what election information the state provides.

When asked for reaction, Matt Dietrich, a spokesman for the State Board of Elections noted in his own statement that under state law, the voter files with exact addresses are “available for purchase only by registered political committees for political use and government entities using it for governmental purposes.”

He wrote also that the state does remove judges from the rolls when requested, as well as people who participate in the state’s Address Confidentiality Program.

Some of this information that LGIS published isn’t even available to political committees anymore. 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 wrote. “It is possible that those who enlisted in these programs after 2016 may have had their addresses published from the 2016 file.”

Timpone’s reasons for publishing voter addresses

While Timpone’s statement to WBEZ was brief, he appeared on Proft’s Chicago radio program last March and discussed in more detail his logic for publishing voter roll information. Timpone in the conversation cast suspicion on how votes were tallied in Cook County’s recent state’s attorney’s race, as well as 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 argues is necessary to prevent voter fraud.

“Let’s make sure everybody who’s registered is made public," Timpone told Proft, who acknowledged that he and Timpone “do newspapers together.”

“A lot of people hear that and say ‘I don’t want my voter information made public,’” Timpone continued. “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 is not true — and there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the city or state.

It is factual that no form of identification is required to vote in Chicago if the person is already registered at their current address, is voting in the correct precinct, has a signature that matches the one on file, and election judges don’t challenge the person’s right to vote.

But one or multiple forms of identification may be required if someone’s right to vote is challenged and 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.

Cook County election records, however, 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 did not specifically address in his statement to WBEZ why his name did not show up in LGIS voter roll data.

The impact of exposing voter info

That some voters’ dates of birth and specific 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 wrote in a statement. “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.”

“LGIS’ failure to adhere to the law potentially put voters at risk for identity theft and other security concerns,” she wrote.

The company’s publication of Illinois voter data is not the first time that 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. And this summer, databases exposed 4.6 million Illinois voter records on the internet, according to a Wired report.

A 2017 Pew Research survey found that 11% of eligible unregistered voters indicated they chose not to register due to privacy or security reasons.

John Davisson, director of litigation for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says 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 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. It exemplifies the threat that can flow from misuse of that information for purposes other than civic participation and voter roll maintenance.”

And once this kind of data appears on the public internet, it can be hard to effectively delete it. That’s because companies that trade in personal information can easily download back-up copies.

“The data broker industry is a multi-billion 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.”

Davisson said “there’s a lot of unregulated conduct and activity in the data broker industry.” He said state and federal regulators are starting to pay more attention to these issues “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 with voter roll access law

While voter rolls had long been provided to political action committees and parties for political use, the public did not have the right to copies of the full voter list in Illinois until after a 2022 federal court ruling in favor of a right-leaning organization that had sued the state for it. State law had banned the public release of the lists, but the group argued federal voting law allowed for it and was in conflict with Illinois’ restrictive policy.

In July, a new law signed by Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker codified the public’s access to the lists, but limited the disclosure to exclude voters’ telephone numbers, Social Security numbers, street numbers of home addresses and birth dates.

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.”

For Kendall, the judge who oversees Chicago’s federal bench, there is not a legitimate purpose in releasing any information on home addresses for judges and prosecutors given the increasing threat level they are facing.

But there’s a bigger issue for the judiciary — and the American system of government itself.

“People have to operate within that system without fear of harm, and that's when democracy works,” she said. “If they are afraid to come into 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.”

Dave McKinney covers Illinois government and politics for WBEZ, and Matt Kiefer is a data journalist.

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. Together, we’re examining critical issues facing our democracy in the run-up to the 2024 elections.